America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the

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

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 consequentialâ€”were â€œHebrewsâ€ a â€œrace,â€ a â€œreligion,â€ or a â€œpeopleâ€? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the governmentâ€™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 distinctionsâ€”between whites and nonwhites, but also among whitesâ€”in immigration laws that lasted four decades.

Despite a gradual shift among social scientists from â€œraceâ€ to â€œethnic groupâ€ 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).
Country USA
Manufacturer Harvard University Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2018-03-26
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Harvard University Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2018-03-26
Format	Kindle eBook

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

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