Inventing the immigration problem : the Dillingham Commission and its legacy / Katherine Benton-Cohen.
2018
JV6483 .B48 2018eb
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Details
Title
Inventing the immigration problem : the Dillingham Commission and its legacy / Katherine Benton-Cohen.
ISBN
9780674985667 (electronic book)
0674985664 (electronic book)
9780674976443
0674976444
0674985664 (electronic book)
9780674976443
0674976444
Published
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2018.
Copyright
©2018
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (342 pages) : illustrations
Call Number
JV6483 .B48 2018eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
325.7309/041
Summary
"In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts--women and men trained in the new field of social science--fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation's place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission's legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission's recommendations--including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy--were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission--which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States--reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America's immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement"--Publisher's description.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
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Inventing the immigration problem.
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Table of Contents
The professor and the commission
The gentlemen's agreement
Hebrew or Jewish is simply a religion
The vanishing American wage earner
Women's power and knowledge
The American type
Not a question of too many immigrants.
The gentlemen's agreement
Hebrew or Jewish is simply a religion
The vanishing American wage earner
Women's power and knowledge
The American type
Not a question of too many immigrants.