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Author Benton-Cohen, Katherine, author.

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

Publication Info. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.
©2018

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe 3rd Floor Stacks  325.09041 B446i 2018    ---  Available
1 copy being processed for Axe Acquisitions Order.
Description 342 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
text txt rdacontent
unmediated n rdamedia
volume nc rdacarrier
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-326) and index.
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.
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.
Subject United States. Immigration Commission (1907-1910) -- Influence.
United States. Immigration Commission (1907-1910) (OCoLC)fst00516278
United States -- Emigration and immigration -- Government policy.
United States -- Emigration and immigration -- Social aspects.
Demographic surveys -- United States.
United States -- History -- 1901-1953.
Demographic surveys. (OCoLC)fst00890138
Emigration and immigration -- Government policy. (OCoLC)fst00908700
Emigration and immigration -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst00908722
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) (OCoLC)fst00972484
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Chronological Term 1901-1953
Genre/Form History. (OCoLC)fst01411628.
ISBN 9780674976443 (hardcover alkaline paper)
0674976444 (hardcover alkaline paper)
Standard No. 40028145152

 
    
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