On CNN’s Sunday morning program, “State of the Union”, former Senator Rick Santorum argued that the Immigration Act of 1924 and all preceding immigration legislation dating back to 1890, “did what was best for the American worker”. Senator Santorum ran for president in 2012 and is currently reassembling campaign infrastructure for another run in 2016. And he thinks the U.S immigration policy from 1890-1924 was not only positive, but did what was best for America.

The Immigration Act of 1924 set national origins quotas at 3%, meaning the United States could not allow immigrants from a given country totaling more than 3% of that country’s population. Soon afterwards, the national origins quotas were reduced to 2%. This provision does not include the Chinese Exclusion Act or ‘Asiatic Barred Zones’. The Chinese Exclusion Act and barred zones forbade immigration from all countries within those zones, including China and many east Asian countries. Immigration laws during this era also included mandated literacy tests tantamount to those administered during the Jim Crow era.

Immigration legislation during the era to which Santorum alluded has been widely panned as xenophobic, racist, and harmful to the American workforce. David Reed, one of the sponsors of the Immigration Act of 1924, stated the purpose of the act was to keep “American stock up to the highest standard-that is, the people who were born here”. The State Department’s Office of the Historian states the purpose of the act was to “preserve American homogeneity”. Senator Santorum seems to agree that most foreign nationals who immigrate to the U.S do not have a positive impact, charging that only his relatives came to the U.S “the right way”. Ironically, the legality of the Santorum family’s immigration to the U.S is questionable at best, according to the Boston Globe. Santorum does not identify how one can arrive at the U.S the correct way, but makes clear how one can arrive the incorrect way; anyone who is not white, wealthy, and fluent in English has committed the crime of arriving in America incorrectly.

Senator Santorum likely will not win the Republican nomination for president, and if he were to win, he likely would not win in the general election. However, only one major news outlet, Bloomberg news, covered Santorum’s deeply troubling and almost unbelievable remarks. One should assume Santorum was misinformed or misspoke. One should hope a national candidate with deep political connections would not ever argue that xenophobic and racist law should make a reappearance in modern America. One should hope that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents would refute such a claims, but all were silent.