THE WAR AND POST-WAR PERIOD : 
On the return of transportation to something akin to normal 
conditions, thousands of foreign-born residents of the United States 
who had been forced by war conditions to postpone a trip to their 
former home sailed for Europe. Among these were many returning 
because of changed political conditions. For example, in the three 
fiscal years 1920, 1921, and 1922, the emigrant aliens destined to 
reconstituted Poland numbered over 90,000, most of them of the 
Polish race. 
Obviously, the emigration movements of the early post-war 
period, at least, need close analysis for other influences before the 
role played by economic conditions in this country can be as- 
certained. 
Tardy Recovery of Immigration. 
Immigration, likewise, was somewhat slow to recover, not quite 
reaching the two hundred and fifty thousand mark in 1919 (calendar 
year). The incoming movement, however, exhibited a growing 
momentum and reached a total of over seven hundred thousand in 
the calendar year 1920, not including nonimmigrants: and even in 
1921, despite industrial depression, did not drop below 50,000 per 
month until June, 1921, by which time the three per centum quota 
law had gone into effect. 
This law was apparently due, in part at least, to the fear that 
the volume of immigration in 1920 was but an indication of the 
growing momentum of a flood of immigrants which had been 
dammed up by war conditions and which now, spurred by actual 
or impending economic and political chaos in Europe, threatened 
to inundate this country with an unprecedented volume of aliens. 
Whatever the facts may be concerning the probability of the 
expected inundation, steps were taken in the law of May, 1921, 
which make the disentanglement of the economic trends in the 
subsequent period more than usually difficult. Because the quotas 
began to be available in July, and twenty per cent of the quota of 
any country could be admitted in a single month, the law has tended 
to concentrate the arrivals in the second half of the calendar year, 
thus creating a seasonal movement materially different from that 
characteristic of the pre-war period, and obscuring the effects of 
industrial prosperity and depression except for those countries 
which were obviously falling short of the quota or, like Canada and 
Mexico, were not subject to the law. 
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