In 1917, while war was still on, the United States introduced a Literacy Act to curtail its immigration flow—which had reached a high number in the years immediately before the war—and Canada enacted similar legislation two years later. In 1921, United States policy became even stricter, with the establishment of a quota system that limited the total intake of Italian immigrants in any one year to about 41,000 (calculated as 3% of the number of Italians residing in the United States in 1910). Furthermore, in 1924, the figures related to the entry of Italians were cut almost to zero, as they were meant to represent the 2% of the Italian component in the United States in 1890. Such severe restrictions meant that part of the great post-war stream of migrants from Italy was progressively diverted to Australia. Nevertheless, the way Italian migrants were conceived by Australian society was not going to change after its perception had formed in the early 1900s. With respect to this attitude, MacDonald wrote: "Italian immigration became the largest non-British movement after the entry of Melanesians and Asians was stopped by the new federal government in 1902. This put Italians at the bottom of the Australian 'racial totem pole', just above other Southern Europeans and Aborigines. The volume of arrivals, the proportion of settlers in the total population of Australia, and the size of Italian agglomerated settlements were trivial by international standards. Yet the establishment of fifty Italian households within a radius of five miles (8 km) or the employment of twenty Italians on a job were cause for alarm in Australian eyes, The 'inferiority' of Italians was generally seen in racist terms as well as specifically in terms of their threatening to compete with labour of British stock because of their 'primitive' way of life". This attitude was also present in other English speaking countries, as Porter reported for Canada. In his classical study of Italians in North Queensland, Douglass suggests other factors affecting such racist attitudes, and reports a summary of the Commonwealth Parliamentary debate of 1927: "The image of the Italian was nourished by the stereotype of the southerner, and particularly the Sicilian. Regardless of its veracity, it could be applied to only a minority of the new arrivals since, by Italian Government estimates, fully two-fifths of its emigrants to Australia were from the Veneto and another two-fifths were drawn from the Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany regions. Only one-fifth were from Sicily and Calabria". Here it is only necessary to add that such disposition was hard to change if, as O'Connor reports by citing a previous work by Bromley, "darkness, smallness, noisiness, fatness and smelliness formed an Australian stereotype of the Italians".