On February 4, 1929, Dr. Joseph A. Hill presented a plan for immigration quotas based on national origin to the United States Senate immigration committee. Hill was the chief statistician of the Census Bureau and chairman of the Quota Board, a committee under the departments of State, Commerce, and Labor. Congress had mandated the board to allocate the quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924. That law restricted immigration into the United States to 150,000 a year based on quotas, which were to be allotted to countries in the same proportion that the American people traced their origins to those countries, through immigration or the immigration of their forebears.¹

     This was the third time in as many years that Hill had submitted a plan to Congress, and again members of Congress interrogated him as to the accuracy of the quotas. Hill's professional authority as one of the nation's leading demographers rested on a thirty-year tenure at the Census Bureau and was manifest in his patrician appearance. But determining the national origins quotas was arguably the most difficult challenge of his career.

     Indeed, in early 1929 it was still not at all certain that the system mandated in 1924 would come into being. Congress had already postponed implementation of the quotas twice. The first two reports submitted by the Quota Board were criticized by organizations representing Irish, German, and Scandinavian Americans for failing to take their populations fully into account. In 1928 protests over the hardships wrought by restriction mounted; Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs), church congregations, and the League of Women Voters petitioned Congress to admit families who were unable to join men who had immigrated before 1924 because those family members lived in countries whose quotas were oversubscribed. The issue hung in political suspension throughout the presidential election campaign of 1928. Herbert Hoover had, as secretary of commerce, signed the Quota Board's first two reports. But he kicked off his presidential campaign in August with a speech that described national origins quotas as impossible to determine "accurately and without hardship," an apparent appeal to German and Scandinavian voters in the Midwest. Observers noted that Hoover's Democratic rival, Al Smith, opposed the quotas in the North while favoring them before southern audiences.²