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Inventing the immigration problem : the Dillingham Commission and its legacy / Katherine Benton-Cohen.

Publication | Not Digitized | Library Call Number: JV6483 .B48 2018

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    Book cover

    Overview

    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.-- Provided by publisher.
    Format
    Book
    Author/Creator
    Benton-Cohen, Katherine, author.
    Published
    Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018
    ©2018
    Locale
    United States
    Contents
    Introduction
    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
    Epilogue
    Dillingham Commission members and selected staff
    Dillingham Commission reports.
    Notes
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-326) and index.
    Introduction -- 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 -- Epilogue -- Dillingham Commission members and selected staff -- Dillingham Commission reports.

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    ISBN
    9780674976443
    0674976444
    Physical Description
    342 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

    Keywords & Subjects

    Record last modified:
    2019-01-11 12:18:00
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/bib268937

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