A Companion to American Immigration E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1394

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to American Immigration is an authoritative collection of original essays by leading scholars on the major topics and themes underlying American immigration history. * Focuses on the two most important periods in American Immigration history: the Industrial Revolution (1820-1930) and the Globalizing Era (Cold War to the present) * Provides an in-depth treatment of central themes, including economic circumstances, acculturation, social mobility, and assimilation * Includes an introductory essay by the volume editor.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part I Policy and Politics

Chapter One A Nation of Immigrants and a Gatekeeping Nation: American Immigration Law and Policy

Definitions and Major Directions

Building America’s Gates: 1875–1930s

Half-Open Gates, 1924–65

Continuity and Change: Post-1965 Immigration Law

Conclusion: A Global Era of Immigration Policy

References

Chapter Two Naturalization and Nationality

Boundary Control: Naturalization Laws, Nationality and Becoming American

Who Naturalizes? Understanding Immigrants’ Acquisition of US Citizenship

Gender and Citizenship

The Role of Residence on Naturalization

Diversity, Culture and American Nationhood

Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter Three Immigration and Ethnic Politics

The Party Period

The Rise of Interest Group Politics

The Multicultural Era

References

Chapter Four Immigrant Transnationals and US Foreign Relations

Case Studies

Conclusions

References

Chapter Five Bodies from Abroad: Immigration, Health, and Disease

References

Further Reading

Chapter Six The Politics of Immigration and the Rise of the Migration State: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Introduction

The Political Aspect of Immigration

The Rise of Rights-Based Politics

The Rise of the Migration State

Conclusion

References

Part II Ethnicity, Race, and Nation

Chapter Seven Ethnic and Racial Identity

References

Chapter Eight Nativism and Prejudice Against Immigrants

References

Chapter Nine Assimilation and American National Identity

The Relationship Between National Identity and Assimilation

What is Assimilation?

The Relationship Between the Problematic Nature of American National Identity and Assimilation

American History, Models of National Identity, and Insistence Upon Assimilation

“Is Assimilation Dead?” Perception and Reality

Conclusion

References

Chapter Three Internationalization and Transnationalization

The Transnational Moment

Lines of Direction in Transnational Analysis of International Migration

Implications of Transnational Theory

The Novelty of Contemporary Patterns of International Migration

Historians’ understandings of transnationalization

New Directions, Old Knowledge

The Transnational Present as History

Notes

References

Chapter Eleven Immigration and Race Relations

“Immigration”

“And”

“Race”

“Relations”

New Words

References

Part III Population and Society

Chapter Twelve Demography and American Immigration

The Three Forces of Demographic Change

The Near-Universality of Fertility Decline

The Demographic Significance of Immigration

Demographic Interactions between Low Fertility and Immigration: “Replacement Migration”

Summary and Conclusions

References

Chapter Thirteen Gender and Immigration

Developing the Concept of Gender 1960–2000

Early National Period

Mid-Nineteenth Century

Shifts from the Late Nineteenth Century

Changing the Balance

Late Twentieth Century

Conclusion

Note

References

Chapter Fourteen Immigrant Residential and Mobility Patterns

Immigrants’ Residential Location

Internal US Mobility

Summary and Discussion

Notes

References

Chapter Fifteen Characteristics of Immigrants to the United States: 1820–2003

1 Questions, Models, and Frameworks

2 Legislation Pertaining to Immigration and Naturalizaiton

3 Data for Studying Migration

4 Characteristics of US Immigrants in the Years 1820 to 2003

5 Concluding Note

Notes

References

Chapter Sixteen Marriage Patterns in Historical Perspective: Gender and Ethnicity

Appendix: Methodology for Marriage Models

Note

References

Part IV Economy and Society

Chapter Sixteen Immigrant Social Mobility and the Historian

Methods Used to Study Historical Mobility

The Rise and Fall of Mobility History

The Flowering of Social-Scientific Mobility Studies

Paths towards Mobility – Jewish Differences and Education

Post-World War II Mobility and the New Immigrants

Conclusion

References

Chapter Eighteen Labor and Immigration History: First Principles

Note

References

Chapter Nineteen Immigration in the Economy: Development and Enterprise

Land

Collective Belief

Labor

Entrepreneurship

Conclusion

References

Suggested Further Reading

Chapter Twenty Immigrants in the American Housing Market

Owning versus Renting

Owner-Occupiers: What Do They Own?

Renters: What Do They Rent?

Summary and Discussion

Notes

References

Part V Culture and Community

Chapter Twenty-One Immigration and American Diversity: Food for Thought

Columbian Cooking

Production and Consumption of Food During the Mass Migrations, 1830–1930

New Immigrants, New Ingredients, a New Century

Culinary Nation-Building

References

Chapter Twenty-Two Immigration and Language

Language and National Identity in American History

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity

Future Directions in the Study of Language and Immigrants in America

References

Suggested Further Reading

Chapter Twenty-Three Immigration and Education in the United States

Creating the Civic Realm: Education and Immigration in the Nineteenth Century

New Purposes, New Means, and New Students

The Newest Immigration: Reaching Higher

References

Chapter Twenty-Four Religion and Ethnicity

Religion and the Ethnic Experience in the “Heart of the Commonwealth”

Lived Religion

Religion and the Density of Community Life

Religion and Acculturation/Assimilation

Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Semitism

Religion in the Emerging Popular Culture of the Twentieth Century

A New Pluralism?

Conclusion

References

Chapter Twenty-Five Mutual Aid Societies and Fraternal Orders

Societies and Orders

Mutual Aid and Benefits

Fraternalism and Gender

Ritual

How American Were the Fraternals?

Fraternals and “Ethnicization”

Building Blocks of Community

Fraternals and Transnationalism

Fraternals as “Non-Voluntary Associations”

Fraternals in Transition, 1920s to 1940s

After World War II

Conclusions

References

Index

A Companion to American Immigration

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY

This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non-specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

Published:

A Companion to the American Revolution Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th-Century America Edited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American South Edited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Indian History Edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to American Women’s History Edited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to Post-1945 America Edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam War

Edited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial America Edited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to 20th-Century America Edited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American West Edited by William Deverell

A Companion to American Foreign Relations Edited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction Edited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American Technology Edited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African-American History Edited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American Immigration Edited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural History Edited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California History Edited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military History Edited by James Bradford

A Companion Los Angeles Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental History Edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman

In preparation:

A Companion to American Urban History Edited by David Quigley

A Companion to Mexican History and Culture Edited by William H. Beezley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to American immigration / edited by Reed Ueda.p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to American history; 15)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN: 978-0-631-22843-1 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-444-33883-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Emigration and immigration.I. Ueda, Reed. II. Series.JV6465.C74   2006304.8273—dc22 2005019818

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Set in 10/12pt Galliard by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Malaysia

1 2011

Notes on Contributors

Tyler Anbinder is Professor of History at George Washington University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1990. His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), won the Avery Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. In 2001, he published Five Points, the history of a nineteenth-century immigrant enclave in New York City.

Irene Bloemraad is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersection of immigration and politics, with emphasis on citizenship, immigrants’ political and civic participation, and multiculturalism. Her work has appeared in journals such as Journal for Interdisciplinary History, Social Forces, International Migration Review, Social Science Quarterly, Annual Review of Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her books include Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement (edited with Karthick Ramakrishnan, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008) and Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada (University of California Press, 2006), which won an honorable mention for the Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s International Migration section.

Nancy C. Carnevale is Assistant Professor of History at Montclair State University. Her publications include No Italian Spoken for the Duration of the War: Language, Italian-American Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in the World War II Years, which appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 2003). Her forthcoming book entitled Living in Translation: Language and Italian Immigrants in the U.S., 1890–1945, will be published by the University of Illinois Press. Her work has been supported by the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Institute sponsored by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and UNITE!, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Barry R. Chiswick is UIC Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also Program Director for Migration Studies at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on issues related to the determinants of migration, the linguistic, geographic, consumption, and labor market adjustment of migrants, and the economic impact of migration on the host economy. His most recent book is The Economics of Immigration (Edward Elgar, 2005).

James J. Connolly is Associate Professor of History at Ball State University. His publications include The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (1998) and numerous articles and essays on American urban and ethnic politics. He is currently at work on a book entitled Democratic Visions: The Urban Political Imagination in Industrializing America.

Clara Cortina is a PhD candidate in Demography at the University Autonoma of Barcelona and granted Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics. She has done work and research on nuptiality with a particular interest in patterns of assortative mating in contemporary Spain.

Albert Esteve is a Research Fellow at the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics at the University Autonoma of Barcelona. He was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Minnesota Population Center and the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, Paris. He specializes in integrating historical and contemporary census statistics and in international comparisons of assortative mating.

Paula S. Fass is the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. Her books include Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (1989); The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1977); Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (1997); and Childhood in America (2000, with Mary Ann Mason). Most recently, she was the editor-in-chief of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (2004) and is currently completing Children of a New World, a volume of essays that examine the history of childhood from social, cultural, and global perspectives.

Leon Fink is UIC Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the PhD concentration in the history of work, race, and gender in the urban world at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also edits the journal Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas. A specialist in labor and immigration history, he is the author or editor of seven books including The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and the winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award of the Western North Carolina Historical Association.

Donna R. Gabaccia holds the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History and is Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She has written and edited many books and articles on immigrant life in the United States and Italian migration around the world. Her most recent works include: Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History (Blackwell, 2003); Emigranti: Le diaspore degli italiani dal Medioevo a oggi (Einaudi, 2003); and, together with Vicki Ruiz, American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). She is also the author of We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Harvard University Press, 1998).

David Gerberis Professor of History at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). As an immigration historian, his interests lie in social and personal identity and in American forms of social pluralism. His publications include Black Ohio and the Color Line (1976); The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825–1861 (1989); Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (2005); and, as editor, Anti-Semitism in American History (1986) and Disabled Veterans in History (2000).

Marilyn Halter is Professor of History and Director of the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University. She is also a Research Associate at BU’s Institute of Culture, Religion and World Affairs. Professor Halter’s published works include: Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (2000); Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965 (1993); The Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde, with Richard Lobban (1988); and her edited volume, New Migrants in the Marketplace: Boston’s Ethnic Entrepreneurs (1995). Her current research project is a national study of recent African immigrants and refugees to the United States.

James F. Hollifield is Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy, Director of International Studies, and Director of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University. He is also member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to SMU, he has held faculty appointments at Duke, Brandeis, and Harvard. In 1992 he was Associate Director of Research at the CNRS and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales of the FNSP in Paris. From 1986 to 1992 he was a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, where he co-chaired the French study group, and in 1991–1992 he was an Associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

Nian-Sheng Huang is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Program at California State University Channel Islands. He obtained his PhD in history from Cornell University in 1990. He has authored Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture (1994) and Franklin’s Father Josiah (2000), both published by the American Philosophical Society.

Guillermina Jasso is Silver Professor and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins. Her main research interests are basic theory and international migration, topics on which she has published widely, including such articles as “How Much Injustice Is There in the World?”; “A New Unified Theory of Sociobehavioral Forces”; and “Estimating the Previous Illegal Experience of New Legal Immigrants.” She served as Special Assistant to the Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and as Director of Research for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, and currently is Co-Principal Investigator of The New Immigrant Survey. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is an elected member/fellow of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, the Sociological Research Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Peter H. Koehn is Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana, Missoula. He is a member of the inaugural class of Fulbright New Century Scholars and recipient of the University of Montana’s Distinguished Scholar award for 2005. He is co-editor of The Expanding Roles of Chinese Americans in U.S.-China Relations: Transnational Networks and Trans-Pacific Interactions (M.E. Sharpe, 2002) and Making Aid Work: Innovative Approaches for Africa at the Turn of the Century (University Press of America, 1999). He is the author of Refugees from Revolution: U.S. Policy and Third-World Migration (Westview, 1991), and co-author of Organizational Communication in Refugee-Camp Situations (United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 2002), Transnational Competence: Empowering Professional Curricula for Horizon-rising Challenges (Paradigm Publishers, 2010), and Transnational Competence in an Emergent Epoch, a vision of international studies piece with James N. Rosenau, International Studies Perspectives 3 (May 2002: 105–27). He has taught at uni versities in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Namibia, China, and Hong Kong. His recent published work focuses on transnational competence in medical encounters and on sustainable development for climatic stabilization.

Alan M. Kraut is Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC and Chair of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation’s History Advisory Committee. From 2000 to 2003 he served as President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. His research interests combine American immigration and ethnic history with the history of medicine and public health. He has authored or edited five books. His most recent volume, Goldberger’s War: The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader (2003), was awarded the 2004 Henry Adams Prize for the best book on the history of the federal government from the Society for History in the Federal Government, and the Arthur J. Viseltear Award for the best book on the history of public health from the American Public Health Association. A previous volume, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the “Immigrant Menace” (1994), won the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Erika Lee is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America co-authored with Judy Yung (Oxford University Press, 2010) and At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), which won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in US immigration and ethnic history and the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is currently completing Asian Americas: A Transnational History of Asian Migration to the Americas.

Robert McCaa is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in population history, particularly of Latin America. Marriageways, including inter-ethnic marriage patterns, are a long-standing interest. His current research obsession is to preserve and harmonize the world’s census microdata for the IPUMS-International project at the Minnesota Population Center.

John McClymer is Professor of History at Assumption College. He is the co-editor of H-Ethnic. His most recent book, The Birth of Modern America, 1919–1939, was published by Brandywine Press (2005). He has published extensively on immigrant, women’s, and social history.

Jeffrey Melnick teaches American Studies at Babson College. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. His books include A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Harvard University Press) and American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press), a volume he co-edited with Rachel Rubin.

Paul W. Miller is Professor in the Department of Economics, School of Economics and Finance, Curtin University of Technology. His primary research interest is labor market performance, particularly as it relates to educational attainment, gender, ethnic, and racial origin. In 1997 he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and in 1994 and again in 2003, he was awarded the Economic Society of Australia’s Best Paper Prize. Professor Miller has over 100 publications in refereed journals on labor market issues.

Michael R. Olneck is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is particularly interested in the sociology and history of the responses of American schools to racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. His recent publications include “Immigrants and Education in the United States,” in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, 2nd edn., edited by J.A. Banks and C.A. McGee.

Mark Rosenzweig is the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics and Director of The Economic Growth Center at Yale University. Prior to this position, he was a member of the faculty and Director of the Center for International Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and also taught in the economics departments at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Departmental Chair for five years, and the University of Minnesota. In 1979–80 he was Director of Research for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy and he is currently Co-Principal Investigator for the New Immigrant Survey, the first national longitudinal survey of immigrants in the United States.

Kenneth A. Scherzer is Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University. He received his PhD at Harvard University and is the author of The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830–1875 (1992) as well as articles on municipal finance and community structure. He is currently engaged in research for a study on the impact of seasons upon urban life.

Suzanne M. Sinke is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. She is the author of Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920 as well as numerous articles on migration and gender. Her current research relates to marriage and international migration in the US context, from “bride ships” to matchmaking websites.

Daniel Soyer is Professor of History at Fordham University. He is author of Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939, editor of A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization and Reform in the New York City Garment Industry, and co-editor of “My Future Is in America”: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants.

Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer, is Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. He was educated at Reed College and at Oxford University. At Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he earned the Oxford doctorate in demography. To date his career has spanned academe, government, and the non-profit sectors, including service as a faculty member at Princeton and Oxford Universities, as leader of a Congressional Committee and Vice Chair and Acting Chair of an influential bipartisan federal commission, as an officer of several scientific societies, and as a foundation executive. He has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Teitelbaum’s publications include 10 books and a large number of articles in scientific and popular journals.

Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University. He is the author of Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (1994) and is co-editor of Faces of Community: Immigrant Massachusetts, 1860–2000 (with Conrad Edick Wright, 2003). Professor Ueda is on the Steering Group of the Committee on International Migration at MIT and is a Research Associate at the Center for American Political Studies of Harvard University.

Xiao-huang Yin is Professor and Chair of the American Studies Program at Occidental College. He earned his PhD at Harvard University and is the author of Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (University of Illinois Press, 2000), co-editor (with Peter H. Koehn) of The Expanding Roles of Chinese Americans in U.S.-China Relations: Transnational Networks and Trans-Pacific Interactions (M.E. Sharpe, 2002), and contributor to more than a dozen books on Asian Americans. He is currently writing a book on Chinese American trans-Pacific migration and community networks.

Introduction

REED UEDA

This volume seeks to provide what has been called an “intellectual attention space,” a meeting place of the mind where leading scholars, students, and informed citizens can encounter up-to-date interpretations (representative of the variety of academic disciplines) of one of the most pervasive and provocative issues in the United States, immigration. As the quintessential “land of immigrants,” the United States had a special relationship to the events of worldwide history. From its colonial origins, the United States developed rapidly into the central destination point of both transoceanic and hemispheric currents of population movement. The origin points of immigration which first centered on Britain and western Europe until the late nineteenth century extended to nearly all regions of the world in the following 100 years. Likewise, the reception points for immigrants which were initially in seaports and nearby hinterlands in the United States during the industrial revolution have spread in the era of globalization to every corner of the country: thus small towns in Maine have become homes to East African immigrants and Minnesota towns have settlements of Indochinese refugees.

As a phenomenon of both global and local import, immigration requires an inquiry that embraces international, transnational, national, as well as ethnic-group levels of activity and experience. The topics investigated here reflect this range of subject matter. These issues have stimulated important scholarly research and have inspired lively debates in the political and public policy realm. The core of the volume consists of historically framed essays which analyze topics of continuing significance – such as immigration policy, education, family and gender, race relations, ethnic identity, politics, religion, social mobility, and assimilation – over the course of the mass immigrations from the nineteenth century to the present, and give treatment where relevant to the roots of these patterns in the colonial era. The essay topics are grouped under five broad areas – “Policy and Politics,” “Ethnicity, Race, and Nation,” “Population and Society,” “Economy and Society,” and “Culture and Community.”

The comparative dimension is a defining feature of the intellectual approaches taken in this volume. These essays involve consideration of the differences and similarities between the immigrants of each era, and the differences and similarities between the conditions they faced; a conspectus of newcomers and their ethnic lifein the nation “then and now.” The authors have also considered what generalizations can be formed about immigrants of a particular historical period, as well as how specific groups can be compared within a shared time frame, in relation to central issues and themes of group history.

There is a broad outlook on continuity and change underlying these essays. Basically, interpretations are made by ranging across a succession of historical periods to follow the manifestations of a specific pattern – such as ethnic or racial identity, transnationalism, or citizenship – in the group life of immigrants and the total life of a pluralist nation. For example, how has the pattern of economic activity by immigrants evolved from colonization, to the industrial revolution, and to the postindustrial economy? To take another example, what conclusions can be drawn about how the United States as a host society worked or did not work to assimilate immigrants, over the whole span of national history?

The collection is primarily historical in approach, but many essays have been selected to exhibit the wide spectrum of conceptual and methodological approaches relevant to the historical study of American immigration. Several essays provide a social-science analysis of issues involving social mobility and the demographics of migration, while others use the perspective of literature and cultural studies: all of these offering potentially useful insights for the continuing development of historical research and interpretation. These essays are in keeping with this volume’s theme of boundary-crossing intellectual encounter, engaging historiography with a host of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and topical perspectives.

Each author has had the opportunity to go beyond a general summary to craft an original and overarching view with a fresh “take,” to grapple with the key controversies underlying a topic, to describe why it has been a vital and stimulating subject of inquiry, and to assess how the scholarly field has approached it and should address it in future research. Taken all together, the essays provide a set of new interpretations that bridge disciplinary and chronological divides, thereby supplying a full, inclusive view much needed in a scholarly field so large that it is vulnerable to fragmentation. As a collective unit, these essays demonstrate the continuing vitality of the study of American immigration and point to future horizons of study that can serve as a new destination for intellectual discovery.

PART I

POLICY AND POLITICS

CHAPTER ONE

A Nation of Immigrants and a Gatekeeping Nation: American Immigration Law and Policy

ERIKA LEE

In March, 1882, US Congressman Edward K. Valentine rose before his colleagues in the House of Representatives and offered his opinion on the Chinese immigration restriction bill under consideration. Chinese immigrants, he and other supporters of the Chinese Exclusion Act argued, were a menace to American labor, society, and even its civilization. “The gate must be closed!” he urged (Gyory 1998, p. 238). When the act was passed in May of that year, the United States took on a new role as a gatekeeping nation, one which used immigration laws to exclude, restrict, and control allegedly dangerous foreigners, often on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. By the 1920s, most immigrants from Asia were barred from entering the country and the numbers of southern and eastern Europeans allowed to apply for admission had been greatly reduced under the discriminatory national origins quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act. Through the 1940s, immigration was viewed as a hindrance, rather than as a benefit, to the United States.

Eighty years after Valentine’s impassioned speech, the national mood towards immigration had begun to shift. In 1958, President John F. Kennedy hailed the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” Immigrants were no longer dangerous menaces, he explained, but rather the bedrock upon which the country had been built (J.F. Kennedy 1964, p. 85). In 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson answered Kennedy’s call for immigration reform and signed into law the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished the discriminatory system of regulation that had governed immigration for 40 years. The signing ceremony took place at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor and signaled a new era of immigration to the United States. Johnson proclaimed that with the new law, “the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today – and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly” (L.B. Johnson 1966, pp. 1037–40). Since 1965, the doors to the United States have been opened wider than at any other time since the late nineteenth century. Millions of people have been admitted into the country and immigration has transformed American society, economy, culture, and politics. The notion that the United States is indeed a nation of immigrants currently reflects reality more than at any other period in the country’s history.

At the same time, however, Americans’ ambivalence about immigration remains deeply ingrained in both public discourses and in immigration law. From the 1970s through the 1990s, an increase in illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, fueled fears of an “invasion” from the south and inspired what some observers describe as the militarization of the US–Mexico border (Andreas 2000; Dunn 1996). Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, new immigration control measures targeting suspected terrorists or those with links to terrorism were instituted, mostly by the US Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In the name of enhancing national security, immigration regulation was placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created Department of Homeland Security, prompting some critics to worry that all immigration would be equated with terrorism (Hing 2002).

Americans are thus once again forced to decide if immigration is good or bad for the country. Who should be allowed in and who should be kept out? How can immigration policy best serve the nation? How should the country control suspicious activities among foreigners already in the United States? And at what risk to immigrant communities and cost to our own civil liberties? Can the United States be both a nation of immigrants and a gatekeeping nation? Although contemporary events have propelled these questions to the forefront of domestic and international policy discussions, immigration law has been critically important to the formation of the United States since the end of the nineteenth century. Based on a complex intersection of economic interests, foreign policies, racial and ethnic biases, and other factors, immigration laws are the gates that allow some immigrants into the country while shutting others out. They control immigration patterns, shape immigrant lives in America, contribute to the formation of the American state, help define what it means to be an “American,” and reflect and reinforce racial, ethnic, class, and gender relations. Historians have long chronicled the most important, landmark laws and studied the politics behind their passage (Divine 1957, p. vii; Bernard 1980; Seller 1984). But such a limited focus obscures the larger significance of immigration policy and its consequences for both immigrant and non-immigrant America.

Reflecting new interdisciplinary trends in scholarship on immigration, this essay analyzes a broad spectrum of local, national, and international immigration policies as well as their effects on both immigrant and non-immigrant communities from 1875 to the present. Considering the development and characterization of the United States as both a gatekeeping nation and a nation of immigrants, the history and contemporary state of US immigration law reflect a deep-rooted ambivalence about the role of immigration and immigrants in American society. Unrestricted or liberal immigration policies have acted as a force of progress, ushering in great waves of immigrants, while restrictive and exclusionary measures have legalized racism and other forms of discrimination in the name of national security. It has not been uncommon for these two divergent immigration goals to coexist at the same time. Understanding American immigration law is thus critically important not only to the study of international migration and immigrant communities, but also to the larger significance and consequences of immigration for the United States itself. The first section of this essay identifies the changing definitions of immigration law as well as major directions in new scholarship. I then explain the historical development of US immigration law and policy from 1875 to the present through three chronologicalsections: the origins of American gatekeeping (regulating for closure) from 1875 to 1924; immigration under the quota system, during depression, and World War II, from 1924 to 1965; and reform, “new” immigration, and transnational immigration regulation from 1965 to the present.

Definitions and Major Directions

Immigration law history is a relatively young sub-field. Primarily interested in migration patterns, community formation, and issues of assimilation, ethnicity, and identity, immigration historians have largely ignored the important role of immigration law and policy. Aristide Zolberg writes that social scientists studying incoming streams of migrants have “paid little or no attention to the fact that the streams were flowing through gates, and that these openings were surrounded by high walls” (Zolberg 1999a, p. 73). When they have focused on the laws and policies affecting immigrants, historians have traditionally focused on two areas: anti-immigrant nativism and the legislative history of immigration law. Studies of the former, building upon the foundation of John Higham’s landmark 1955 study, Strangers in the Land, have sought to explain the motivations and social, intellectual, political, economic, racial, and ethnic factors behind nativist patterns in US history (Higham 1978, p. 4; Solomon 1989; Daniels 1962, 2004; De Leon 1983; Saxton 1971; Anbinder 1992; Kraut 1994). Other scholars have emphasized the congressional and presidential politics behind the passage of landmark immigration laws. Both bodies of scholarship employ the traditional definition of immigration law as “front gate immigration,” the admission of foreigners who intend to become permanent residents of the United States (Fitzgerald 1996, pp. 17–18).

But immigration to the United States and immigrants already in the country are affected by a broad range of policies outside of those passed by Congress. These may include presidential executive orders, the administrative procedures and policies of the immigration service, and state-and local-based restrictions on social welfare benefits for foreigners, resident aliens, naturalized citizens, and native-born citizens. Studies that only focus on those who intend to become permanent residents unnecessarily limit scholarly inquiry. Foreigners arriving to and residing in the United States come as laborers, students, travelers, skilled professionals, refugees, asylum seekers, and relatives of citizens. Some are long-term residents, but do not become naturalized citizens. Others stay for only a short time and then return home. Some come illegally, either with no documents or with false ones, and are subjected to government harassment and perhaps arrest and deportation.

US immigration law thus has a far-reaching impact on a wide range of individuals in immigrant and ethnic communities. An interdisciplinary group of scholars, especially those involved in studying the relationship between law and society, have led an intellectual redefinition of immigration law to reflect this reality. A first group of writers has helped broaden our understanding of immigration law to include state and local laws; enforcement procedures by the courts, administrative agencies like the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, and consular officials abroad; and policies regulating the “back-door immigration” of undocumented immigrants and of refugees (Neuman 1993; Salyer 1995; Peffer 1999; Fitzgerald 1996, p. 18; E. Lee 2003; Ngai 2004; K. Johnson 2004). A broader perspective on immigration law hasallowed us to better understand the historical development of immigration regulation and its expansion to a wider range of individuals. It also helps scholars re-examine the contests surrounding enforcement procedures, the place of immigration law in comparison to other aspects of US law, and the role that immigration law has played in the growth of the federal government’s administrative power. Lucy Salyer’s study of the enforcement of the immigration laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, demonstrates how federal immigration regulation moved out of the realm of federal courts and into newly created federal agencies, like the Bureau of Immigration (Salyer 1995). Many other scholars explore immigration law at its “bottom fringes,” focusing on the ways in which policies have been interpreted and enforced by immigration officials, courts, government employees, and social workers and contested by immigrants themselves. The focus on enforcement, rather than solely on the legislation itself, has enabled scholars to address a number of larger issues, such as the role of government in American society, the social and economic goals of immigration policy, the rights of individuals, the construction and deployment of race, class, gender, and sexuality in immigration regulation, and the power of both immigrants and the state (Calavita 2000; E. Lee 2003; Schuck 1984; Zolberg 1999a; Hing 1993; Luibhéid 2002; Ngai 2004).

A third area of focus has been on the immigrants themselves, tracing the ways in which immigration laws have affected immigrant settlement patterns, identity construction, family relations, gender ratios, internal community dynamics and politics, social, economic, and political incorporation, and occupational opportunities (Hing 1993; Palumbo-Liu 1999; E. Lee 2003; Gutiérrez 1998; Ong 2003). These studies have fully demonstrated that immigrants have consistently and creatively challenged discrimination in immigration law and enforcement, through the judicial system, political action, and everyday acts of resistance and negotiation. A fourth group of scholars has paved the way in explaining how immigration policy is, as Kevin Johnson has described, a “magic mirror” reflecting and shaping attitudes about race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity in the larger society (K. Johnson 1998, 2004; see also Lopez 1996; Ngai 2004; Jacobson 1998; Luibhéid 2002). Immigrants were targeted for immigration restriction on the basis of many factors, but race and ethnicity were especially important in determining which immigrants were considered to be the most threatening to the United States. Studies focusing on groups that were the greatest targets of immigration restriction – immigrants and refugees from Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, and southern and eastern Europe – have contributed greatly to this area of scholarship. Donna Gabaccia and Eithne Luibhéid have also illustrated how immigration laws were used to control sexuality and women’s admission into the United States (Gabaccia 1994; Luibhéid 2002).

While most studies on immigration law remain centered within the United States, a fifth new direction in the field has turned to the question of immigration policy as a transnational subject, one whose origins and impact may reach across national borders. Restrictions against Chinese immigrants, what Aristide Zolberg has called the world’s “first immigration crisis,” were implemented through North America, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand (Zolberg 1999b; Huttenback 1976; Price 1974; Markus 1979; E. Lee 2002b). Indeed, migration has dramatically increased across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and as more nations grapple with its consequences, the importance of understanding immigrationlaw becomes a question not only of local and national dimensions, but transnational and global ones as well (Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield 1994).

Building America’s Gates: 1875–1930s

Although the United States did not attempt to regulate foreign immigration on the federal level until the late nineteenth century, colonial and state governments played an important role in both encouraging and restricting immigrants prior to then. Western and southern states encouraged immigration to increase population in those regions. As Gerald Neuman has illustrated, state governments also attempted to prohibit the transportation of foreign criminals or paupers into their jurisdictions (Neuman 1993, pp. 1834, 1837–8). The federal government did set the terms for the naturalization of foreigners. At the same time extremely generous and highly restrictive, the 1790 Naturalization Act reflected the young nation’s ambivalence about immigration and set important precedents for subsequent immigration and naturalization laws. The act allowed all “free white persons” who had been in the United States for as little as two years to be naturalized in any American court, thereby mirroring Congress’s confidence in the ability of European immigrants to assimilate and become worthy American citizens. But the act also explicitly neglected to include non-whites under the naturalization statutes and thus encoded into law a racialized national identity that marked African Americans and American Indians (and later, immigrants from outside of Europe) as outsiders (Kettner 1978, pp. 108–10; Gerstle 2001, pp. 4–7; Schneider 2001).

The racial restrictions on naturalized citizenship allowed the federal government to assume gatekeeper functions and had long-lasting repercussions. When Asian immigrants tried to become naturalized citizens, they were consistently denied by the courts which ruled that they were not “white” as required by the Naturalization Act (Lopez 1996, pp. 79–110). Immigration laws also reaffirmed the ban on naturalized citizenship for Asians (Chinese Exclusion Act, act of May 6, 1882 (22 Stat. 58); Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Stat. 153)). At the same time, the generous extension of naturalization to all whites allowed European immigrants to automatically claim membership in the nation and foster a strong political presence. Although Italians, Greeks, Poles, Croats, and Slovenians were often considered or viewed as James Barrett and David Roediger have argued, “in-between people” in the larger American culture, the state still considered them “white” and consistently allowed them to be naturalized. As they explain, “the power of the national state [in the form of the country’s immigration and naturalization laws] gave recent immigrants both their firmest claims to whiteness and their strongest leverage for enforcing those claims” (Barrett and Roediger 1997, pp. 9–10). Thomas Guglielmo has further argued that Italian immigrants were simply “white on arrival,” and that this fact had profound implications in their ability to achieve socio-economic stability, start families, and participate in local and national politics (Guglielmo 2003, pp. 6–7).

During the 1850s, immigration became a central political topic with the rise of the so-called Know-Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party which sought to decrease the political influence of new immigrants by extending the standard naturalization waiting period to 21 years. But immigrant labor had become central to the nation’s industries, and the Know-Nothings never proposed restricting the flowof immigrants (Anbinder 1992, pp. 121–2). Just a few decades later, immigration restriction had become a political and legal reality in the United States. From 1880 to 1920, 23.5 million immigrants entered the United States, mostly from southern, central, and eastern Europe and from Asia (Barkan and LeMay 1999, p. xxxiv). These large-scale changes in the racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural composition of the immigrant population triggered an explosive xenophobic reaction based on racial and religious prejudice, fears of radicalism, and class conflict (Higham 1978). Combined with a new national identity that connected issues of immigration to sovereignty, the growth and expansion of the administrative capacities of the federal government that had begun during Reconstruction allowed it to exercise more control over immigration than ever before (Schuck 1984, p. 3).

The first immigrant group to be targeted for restriction were Chinese. From 1870 to 1880, a total of 138,941 Chinese immigrants entered the country, 4.3 percent of the total number of immigrants (3,199,394) who entered the country during the same decade. Their small numbers notwithstanding, Chinese immigrants were the targets of racial hostility, discriminatory laws, and violence. Opponents to Chinese immigration cited their use as cheap labor to support their argument that Chinese were a threat to white workingmen. Comparing Chinese immigration to the African American race “problem” in the south, anti-Chinese politicians warned that similar racial strife would beset the Pacific Coast states should Chinese immigration continue unabated. But class issues were inextricably tied to other race-and gender-based arguments that identified Chinese as too foreign and unassimilable. Chinese prostitution and what Americans believed to be aberrant gender relations among Chinese also fueled support for the restriction movement (E. Lee 2003, pp. 25–30; Wong 1998, p. 6; R. Lee 1999, p. 28; Leong 2000, pp. 131–48).

Politicians in Washington, DC responded to the California lobby and excluded Asian contract labor and women (mostly Chinese) suspected of entering the country for “lewd or immoral purposes” with the 1875 Page Act. As Tony Peffer has demonstrated, the law represented the country’s first – albeit limited – regulation of immigration on the federal level, and served as an important step towards other immigration restriction, particularly the exclusion of Chinese immigrants (act of March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 477); Peffer 1999, p. 28; Salyer 1995, p. 5). Seven years later, Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the further immigration of Chinese laborers, allowed only a few select classes of Chinese immigrants to apply for admission, and affirmed the prohibition of naturalized citizenship on all Chinese immigrants (act of May 6, 1882, ch. 126 (22 Stat. 58)). The Chinese thus became the first immigrant group to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class.

Early historians argued that the anti-Asian movements that targeted Chinese, and then all other Asian immigrants, were “historically tangential” to the main currents of American nativism. They identified debates over immigration and race in the 1920s – when a national origins quota system was established – as the most significant period of American immigration restriction (Higham 1978, preface, p. 167). More recent scholarship, however, argues that the Chinese Exclusion Act, together with the Page Law, transformed the nation into a gatekeeping nation. By affirming the right of sovereign states to control immigration and by legalizing restriction and exclusion based on race, the laws paved the way for subsequent immigration restrictionpolicies. Equally important, the enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws set in motion new bureaucracies, modes, and technologies of immigration regulation, such as federal immigration officials who inspected and processed newly arriving foreigners, government-issued identity and residence documents, such as US passports and “green cards,” and further regulations such as illegal immigration and deportation policies (Daniels 1997, p. 3; Peffer 1999; Torpey 2000, pp. 97–100; E. Lee 2003, pp. 30–43).

Once the principle of immigration restriction had been established in law, Congress acted quickly to bar other allegedly dangerous aliens from the nation’s shores on the basis of race, gender, class, physical and moral fitness, political beliefs, and sexuality, among other factors. In 1882, it passed an immigration law which barred criminals, prostitutes, paupers, lunatics, idiots, and those likely to become public charges (act of August 3, 1882, ch. 367 (22 Stat. 214)). Three years later, the Alien Contract Labor Law was passed on the grounds that such forms of immigrant labor were a detriment to white workers (The Foran Act (23 Stat. 332)). In 1891, Congress forbade the entry of polygamists and aliens convicted of a crime involving “moral turpitude” (Immigration Act of 1891 (26 Stat. 1084)). By 1907, another immigration law excluded anarchists and the moral exclusion clauses had been broadened (Immigration Act of 1903 (32 Stat. 1203, section 2); Immigration Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 898)). Many of the general immigration laws, such as the exclusions of immigrants who were “likely to become public charge” or who had committed a “crime involving moral turpitude,” were gender-neutral, but as scholars have illustrated, immigrant women were disproportionately affected by them. As Donna Gabaccia explains, “any unaccompanied woman of any age, marital status, or background might be questioned” as a potential public charge, and sexual misdeeds such as adultery, fornication, and illegitimate pregnancy were all reasons for exclusion (Gabaccia 1994, p. 37).

Public concern about immigration in the early twentieth century revolved around a number of issues, but race played perhaps the largest role in determining which immigrant groups to admit or exclude. By the 1910s and 1920s, the arguments and lessons of Chinese exclusion were resurrected over and over again during the nativist debates over the “new” immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and southern and eastern Europe. Following the exclusion of Chinese, Americans on the West Coast became increasingly alarmed about new immigration from Asia, particularly from Japan, Korea, and India. Californians portrayed the new immigration as yet another “Oriental invasion,” and San Francisco newspapers urged readers to “step to the front once more and battle to hold the Pacific Coast for the white race.” In 1907, under pressure from Washington, DC, Japan signed a diplomatic accord, known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” which effectively ended the immigration of Japanese and Korean laborers (E. Lee 2003, pp. 30–46).

On the East Coast, nativist groups such as Boston’s Immigration Restriction League targeted the “new” waves of southern and eastern European immigrants settling and working in northeastern cities. Although these immigrants from Europe were considered legally white, many anti-immigrant leaders considered them racially different and inferior to Anglo-Saxons and northern and western European Americans. The sense of “absolute difference” that already divided white Americans from people of color was extended to certain European nationalities, and new “scientific” studiesargued that immigrants from places like Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, Rumania, and Greece were inferior compared to earlier immigrants from northern and western Europe. The US Immigration Commission’s 1911 report gave credibility to such studies by announcing that new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were highly unassimilable and that their presence caused social problems such as crime, prostitution, and labor problems (Higham 1978, pp. 132–3).

By the early twentieth century, the American public largely supported the call to “close the gates” to immigration in general. The Immigration Act of 1917 required a literacy test for all adult immigrants, tightened restrictions on suspected radicals, and as a concession to politicians on the West Coast, denied entry to aliens living within a newly conceived geographical area called the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” With this zone in place, the United States effectively excluded all immigrants from India, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, Arabia, Afghanistan, part of Russia, and most of the Polynesian Islands (Immigration Act of 1917 (39 Stat. 874)). The Quota Act of 1921 limited annual admissions to 355,000 and restricted the number of aliens admitted annually to 3 percent of the foreign-born population of each nationality already residing in the United States in 1910. The act was designed to limit the immigration of southern and eastern European immigrants, whose populations had been much smaller in 1910. By the same token, the act was designed to favor the immigration of northern and western European immigrants who had as a group already been a large presence in the United States in 1910 (Quota Act of 1921 (42 Stat. 5, section 2)). Although the numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants decreased greatly after 1921, nativists pushed for even greater restrictions. The 1924 act thus reduced the total number of admissions to 165,000, changed the percentage admitted from 3 to 2, and moved the census date from 1910 to 1890, when southern and eastern European immigrants had yet to arrive in large numbers (Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Stat. 153); Higham 1978, pp. 308–24; Ueda 1994, p. 22). No restrictions were based on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, but the act closed the door on any further Asian immigration by denying admission to all aliens who were “ineligible for citizenship” (i.e. those to whom naturalization was denied) (Quota Act of 1921 (42 Stat. 5, section 2); Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Stat. 153); Higham 1978, pp. 308–24).

While historians had previously focused most of their attention on the nativist and legislative debates surrounding immigration law during this formative period, new studies are just beginning to concentrate on the consequences of the laws themselves and the ways in which they altered immigration patterns, labor markets, community and family formation, ethnic and racial identities and politics, the administrative state, and the very role of immigration in American life. First, immigration in general decreased dramatically, especially amongst those groups most affected by the new restrictions. While 23.5 million immigrants had entered the country from 1880 to 1920, fewer than 6 million entered from 1920 to 1965 (Barkan and LeMay 1999, p. xxxiv). In 1921, prior to establishment of the nationality quotas, 222,260 Italians entered the United States. From 1925 to 1930, the average number of Italians allowed into the country dropped to 14,969, about 7 percent of the 1921 entries (Zolberg 1999a, p. 75).

Moreover, due to the racial discrimination inherent in the laws themselves, late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century immigration debates and policies shapednew understandings and definitions of race and racial categories – a process that sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called “racial formation” (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 55). By the 1920s, a hierarchy of admissible and excludable immigrants had been codified into law, reinforcing ideas of “fitness” that were measured by an immigrant’s race, ethnicity, class, and gender. As Mae Ngai has shown, the 1924 Immigration Act applied the invented category of “national origins” to Europeans – a classification that presumed a shared whiteness with white Americans and separated them from non-Europeans. The act thus established the legal foundations for European immigrants to become Americans, while “colored races … [were kept] outside the concept of nationality, and therefore, citizenship” (Ngai 2004, p. 27). Matthew Frye Jacobson further explains that immigration restriction, along with internal black migrations, “redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black … creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs.” By the 1960s, European immigrants and their descendants were well on their way to being accepted simply as Caucasians (Jacobson 1998, p. 14). Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Asian Indian immigrants, on the other hand, were codified in the 1924 act as “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” and as a result were further marginalized as outsiders within America (Ngai 1999, p. 70). Such debates about immigration and racial classifications directly affected African Americans, reinforcing and justifying their second-class citizenship and the Jim Crow laws of segregation during this period (King 2000, pp. 2, 138–65).

The great migrations of Asians, Europeans, and Mexicans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also coincided with and helped instigate a new level of expansion, centralization, and bureaucratization of the federal government. This “state-building” came in the form of regulating both foreigners arriving into the United States and foreigners and citizens already residing there (E. Lee 2003, pp. 21–2; Torpey 2000, p. 1; Palumbo-Liu 1999, p. 31; Fitzgerald 1996, pp. 96–144; Zolberg 1999a, pp. 71–93). The federal government increasingly gained full control over the regulation of immigration by creating a federal bureaucratic machinery with which to make and enforce immigration policy. The Immigration Act of 1891 gave to federal administrators the sole power to enforce immigration laws and established the Bureau of Immigration as part of the Treasury Department. By 1903, the Bureau had become a centralized and powerful agency and was transferred to its parent department, the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor (an act to establish the Department of Commerce and Labor (32 Stat. L., 825); Smith and Herring 1924, p. 10). In 1906, the Bureau of Immigration became the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, undertaking control over the naturalization of immigrants (act of June 29, 1906 (34 Stat. L., 596); Smith and Herring 1924, p. 12). By 1924, as political scientist Keith Fitzgerald has illustrated, a “national policy network for front-gate immigration policy had emerged.” Standing congressional committees, national interest groups, federal bureaus and agencies all monitored immigration and shaped immigration policy (Fitzgerald 1996, p. 145).

Indeed, in the process of determining whom to let in and whom to keep out, the very definition of what it meant to be an “American” was constructed and reinforced. Excluded from the country and barred from naturalization, Asians were largely considered outside the circle of “we the people.” Americans were more confidentabout the ability of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to eventually acquire the necessary skills for responsible citizenship, but the drastic restrictions on new immigration were required, politicians argued, to allow the US to fully absorb the newcomers.

Half-Open Gates, 1924–65