|
|
Product Description
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.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
- The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life
- The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America
- Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration
- The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954
- Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Studies in Legal History)
- Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
- Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II
- The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
*If this is not the "Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Jan 22, 2025 07:51 +08.
