America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census

by Joel Perlmann

Overview

When more than twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920, the government attempted to classify them according to prevailing ideas about race and nationality. But this proved hard to do. Ideas about racial or national difference were slippery, contested, and yet consequential—were “Hebrews” a “race,” a “religion,” or a “people”? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the government’s 1897 List of Races and Peoples, which shaped exclusionary immigration laws, the wording of the U.S. Census, and federal studies that informed social policy. Its categories served to maintain old divisions and establish new ones.

Across the five decades ending in the 1920s, American immigration policy built increasingly upon the belief that some groups of immigrants were desirable, others not. Perlmann traces how the debates over this policy institutionalized race distinctions—between whites and nonwhites, but also among whites—in immigration laws that lasted four decades.

Despite a gradual shift among social scientists from “race” to “ethnic group” after the 1920s, the diffusion of this key concept among government officials and the public remained limited until the end of the 1960s. Taking up dramatic changes to racial and ethnic classification since then, America Classifies the Immigrants concentrates on three crucial reforms to the American Census: the introduction of Hispanic origin and ancestry (1980), the recognition of mixed racial origins (2000), and a rethinking of the connections between race and ethnic group (proposed for 2020).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674986206
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Joel Perlmann is Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Research Professor at Bard College.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction Part One. The List of Races and Peoples 1. Creating and Refining the List, 1898–1906 2. Immigration—Especially European—through the Lens of Race 3. First Struggles over the List: Jewish Challenges and the Federal Defense, 1899–1903 4. The United States Immigration Commission, 1907–1911 5. Urging the List on the U.S. Census Bureau, 1908–1910 6. The Census Bureau Goes Its Own Way: Race, Nationality, and Mother Tongue, 1910–1916 Part Two. Institutionalizing Race Distinctions in American Immigration Law 7. The Second Quota Act, 1924 8. Immigration Law for White Races and Others: Three Episodes Part Three. The Ethnic Group: Formulation and Diffusion of an American Concept, to 1964 9. From “Race” to “Ethnic Group”: Organizing Concepts in American Studies of Immigrants, to 1964 10. From Social Science to the Federal Bureaucracy? Limited Diffusion of the “Ethnic Group” Concept through the Early 1950s Part Four. Incorporating the Legacies of the Civil Rights Era and Mass Immigration from the Third World 11. Race and the Immigrant in Federal Statistics since 1965 Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

A well-written, compelling analysis of how the U.S. statistical system grappled with the increasing heterogeneity of the origins of immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It is a story that tells us as much (or more) about America—including its political decisions, the federal bureaucracy, attitudes toward race, and the social sciences over this period—as it does about the immigrants themselves.

Studies in Contemporary Jewry - Barry R. Chiswick

A work of exacting scholarship and exemplary good sense. Perlmann illuminates as no other scholar has the process by which Americans decided how to classify immigrants. His account offers a much richer and more complex picture of the story than is found in any other work of historical writing.

David A. Hollinger

We can learn a lot from [this] book about how conflicting agendas, behemoth ambitions, and unwarranted optimism produced classification schemes that negatively affected the lives of millions of Americans and would-be immigrants. We might do well to pair that knowledge with a stronger sense of humility than our forbearers held as we move forward in our own research.

Journal of Urban History - Jessica H. Lee

Perlmann provides us with a brilliant historical account of how Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Jews, were thought about, classified, and rendered legible by the state.

Michael Omin Journal of Sociology

A work of deep erudition, impressive for its temporal scope but no less because breadth does not come at the expense of a fine-grained account of governmental classificatory practices. The key episodes selected by the author allow us to probe what it means that immigration policy was propelled by official acts of discrimination…Meticulously written, clear, and provocative—a book not to be missed.

International Migration Review - David Cook-Martín

A readable and sophisticated discussion of the context of social science thinking about race, ethnicity, and national origins for official statistics on immigrant origins…A panoramic survey. It is a deeply researched and captivating book…Provides rich insights into the ways in which immigrants have been classified in America.

Population and Development Review - Barry Edmonston

A cogent and compelling analysis of the muddle of meanings embedded in the terms race, peoples, national origins, and mother tongue as used by scholars, politicians, and administrators in the Bureau of Immigration and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Forward - Glenn C. Altschuler

An insightful examination of how the US adopted and revised categories of immigrants over almost 150 years…Well researched and lucidly presented.

Choice

Perlmann transforms our understanding of the history of government efforts to racially classify immigrants to the United States. He unearths a number of fascinating discoveries about a history that many thought was already well-known. His book will be essential reading for all serious scholars of immigration.

Mara Loveman

We cannot understand America unless we understand race and immigration. To truly comprehend how these two histories overlap and intertwine, we need look no further than the United States government’s struggle to define, categorize, and count immigrants and members of racial and ethnic groups. It is Perlmann’s brilliant achievement to take what has too often been written as separate stories and tell it as one still unfinished story.

Kenneth Prewitt

Perlmann provides us with a brilliant historical account of how Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Jews, were thought about, classified, and rendered legible by the state.

American Journal of Sociology - Michael Omi

A work of deep erudition, impressive for its temporal scope but no less because breadth does not come at the expense of a fine-grained account of governmental classificatory practices. The key episodes selected by the author allow us to probe what it means that immigration policy was propelled by official acts of discrimination…Meticulously written, clear, and provocative—a book not to be missed.

International Migration Review - David Cook-Martín

Perlmann has written a work of deep erudition, impressive for its temporal scope but no less because breadth does not come at the expense of a fine-grained account of governmental classificatory practices…It is meticulously written, clear, and provocative—a book not to be missed.

International Migration Review - David Cook-Martin