Benton-Cohen, Katherine
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy
Harvard (Cambridge)
2018
OUR SYNOPSIS: Katherine Benton-Cohen examines “the largest study of immigrants ever conducted in the United States—the so-called Dillingham Commission,” and its impacts on immigration. (1) The commission reflected its Progressive Era historical moment, seeking to leverage bureaucratic expert authority to inform and reform policy. She argues that it problematized immigration and proposed its solutions, with implications for immigration policy that extend into the present day. The commission believed that the federal government should have the power to categorize and rank groups of people. Indeed, it disproportionately concerned itself with Japanese immigration, while heated debates over classifying Jewish immigrants shed light on disputed meanings of race. However, she also argues such policies were not yet eugenical. Eugenics-based immigration policies did not come until the 1920s.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What major factors encouraged these American reformers to frame immigration as a problem?
What does the commission’s approach to race say about how it understood the concept?
To what extent did women seize prominent roles in the work of the Dillingham Commission?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“The vast federal bureaucracy they envisioned has endured and swelled in the century since. Progressive Era experts called immigration a ‘problem’ and created a framework for federal bureaucracy to solve it with a confident swagger that belied the contradictions of their own research footings. This is the Dillingham Commission’s legacy to us.” (4)
“Above all, Dillingham Commission members held close ties to academia, the Republican Party, and organizations such as the National Civic Federation, all of which valued study, solution, and policy. They produced a particular kind of knowledge, accepted because it was quantitative and produced by experts. But they did not necessarily follow it to its nuanced and conflicting conclusions. They believed in federal power in general, and in federal power over immigration policy specifically.” (235)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), 45-48, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015005646693.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
N/A
