The interwar years were marked by a fundamental change in the nature of international migration. The rate of overseas emigration from Europe to the Americas declined sharply throughout the 1920s, after an initial postwar boom. Restrictions on both emigration and immigration were introduced by a number of states, most notably in the form of the imposition of national quotas on immigrants by the United States in 1921 and 1924, which favoured migrants from north-western Europe. In Hungary, the Soviet Union and Germany the freedom to emigrate was restricted in the 1920s. In Italy, notwithstanding a policy to promote emigration in the early 1920s, in 1927 the fascist regime under Mussolini adopted measures which aimed to restrict movement out of the country on the basis that emigration ‘represented the loss of Italy's greatest resource’. But the decline in overseas emigration was also influenced by wider developments in the international economy from the late 1920s onwards as most of the major economies were in the midst of deep recession. Opportunities for migrants to obtain employment in prospective receiving societies were few, especially with the steep rise in the level of unemployment in the United States and elsewhere. This combination of factors explains the decline in overseas emigration from Europe in the interwar period. Indeed the remainder of the twentieth century would be an ‘age of migration’, although transatlantic migration never regained its pre-eminence.