In the nineteenth century, virtually anyone could get into the United States. But by the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy had become a finely filtered regime of selection. Desmond King looks at this dramatic shift, and the debates behind it, for what they reveal about the construction of an "American" identity.
Specifically, the debates in the three decades leading up to 1929 were conceived in terms of desirable versus undesirable immigrants. This not only cemented judgments about specific European groups but reinforced prevailing biases against groups already present in the United States, particularly African Americans, whose inferior status and second-class citizenship—enshrined in Jim Crow laws and embedded in pseudo-scientific arguments about racial classifications—appear to have been consolidated in these decades. Although the values of different groups have always been recognized in the United States, King gives the most thorough account yet of how eugenic arguments were used to establish barriers and to favor an Anglo-Saxon conception of American identity, rejecting claims of other traditions. Thus the immigration controversy emerges here as a significant precursor to recent multicultural debates.
Making Americans shows how the choices made about immigration policy in the 1920s played a fundamental role in shaping democracy and ideas about group rights in America.
Desmond King is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Immigrant America
Immigration and American Political Development
A Less Intelligent Class? The Dillingham Commission and the New Immigrants
II. Defining Americans
"The Fire of Patriotism": Americanization and U.S. Identity
"Frequent Skimmings of the Dross": Building an American Race?
"A Very Serious National Menace": Eugenics and Immigration
III. Legislating Americans
Enacting National Origins: The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924)
"A Slur on Our Citizenry": Dismantling National Origins: The 1965 Act
IV. Legacies
After Americanization: Ethnic Politics and Multiculturalism
The Diverse Democracy
Appendix
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
Robert C. Lieberman
King links debates and decisions about immigration with concurrent developments in the politics of race in the United States, particularly drawing parallels between the way in which the boundaries of full citizenship excluded both African-Americans and immigrants from outside of western Europe. He weaves a fascinating and convincing account of the roots of American multiculturalism, an account that adds considerably to the increasingly tired ideological debate over multiculturalism and its causes and consequences. This is a very fine piece of work, exhaustively researched, effectively presented, and well written. — Robert C. Lieberman, author of Shifting the Color Line (Harvard)
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Students of U.S. politics will welcome this synthetic treatment of 'Americanization,' racialist thought, and citizenship in the 1910s and 1920s. Among the most thorough accounts in existence of the 1924 immigration legislation, Making Americans has much to suggest about current debates over multiculturalism, their deep roots in early twentieth century diversity-in-the-making, and Progressive Era constructions of--and resistance to--'difference.' — Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of Whiteness of a Different Color(Harvard)
Jennifer Hochschild
Research on American immigration policy and history is considerable, and research on American racial attitudes and policies is vast -- but embarrassingly few people have drawn clear and compelling links between the two topics. This book does. Making Americans is history for our times; it brings a completely contemporary sensibility to a very traditional subject, and thereby illuminates both current debates and historical causes. — Jennifer Hochschild, author of Facing Up to the American Dream
