The year is 1923. After a brief lull, mass immigration has resumed.

Tens of thousands of migrants flock to New York City, a place of great opportunity and great inequality.

Tensions are rising, along with housing and job insecurity.

New Yorkers of all political stripes say there has to be a limit to the unprecedented flood of new arrivals.

Sound familiar?

A century ago, New York and other cities faced a migrant crisis that has striking parallels to the present one.

And the solution for overwhelmed communities then remains the only one that’ll work now — the federal government must humanely, but credibly, scale immigration back to a more sustainable level.

To fully understand the current crisis, we need to first understand immigration’s history.

In the decades following the Civil War, tens of millions of foreigners — largely from Southern and Eastern Europe — flocked to America.

It was an entirely rational decision on their part. Who could blame them for seeking economic opportunities?

But the sheer number of newcomers overwhelmed cities’ infrastructure.

The destitute migrants accepted any jobs, no matter how dangerous, dirty or low-paying — thus undercutting the budding labor-rights movement.

The situation benefited slumlords and sweatshop owners but few others.

Finally, in response to public pressure — including from influential labor and civil-rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph — Congress sharply reduced immigration in 1924.

The reform brought an end to the “Great Wave” of immigration — and forced employers to improve working conditions and raise wages.

Economic historians refer to the following period as “The Great Leveling.”

Over the next several decades, America grew wealthier overall, but the gains the working class saw far exceeded those of the wealthy.

No group profited more than the descendants of slaves.

In 1920, just 20% of black Americans were considered middle class.

By 1970, more than 70% were. Between 1940 and 1980, real incomes for black men expanded four-fold, almost twice as rapidly as whites’.

Yet the narrowing of the racial wealth gap stopped after Congress expanded immigration in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.

“Immigration has thus been part of the story of rising U.S. inequality since the 1970s,” say economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “much as rising immigration was also part of the inequality story between the 1860s and World War I.”

According to Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to then-Vice President Joe Biden, one “surefire way to short-circuit” working-class upward mobility “is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

The solution is hardly a mystery.

In fact, my organization was founded to advocate the proposals put forward by the Clinton-era Jordan Commission, chaired by the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), the first southern black woman elected to Congress.

The commission proposed scaling back legal immigration and cracking down on illegal immigration to protect “the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”

The Biden administration has exacerbated the crisis by paroling hundreds of thousands of people into the United States and releasing more than 900,000 illegal immigrants caught by Border Patrol agents. 

Congress can reverse those reckless policies by including HR2 — a comprehensive package that’d tighten parole, end catch-and-release and implement other crucial reforms — in the next must-pass funding bill.

This migrant crisis is not unlike problems we’ve faced before.

To solve it, we need to reestablish and enforce credible limits on immigration.

Jeremy Beck is vice president of NumbersUSA.