Immigration Historiography at the Crossroads

Well-respected immigration historians James M. Berquist and June Granatir Alexander have both recently published significant works of synthesis in the field. Together they cover the classic era of European immigration from the return of prosperity and rise of immigration in the 1820s, following the Panic of 1819, to the imposition of quota laws on immigration in the 1920s. These studies provide an opportunity to take the measure of the current state of immigration historiography, a particularly self-conscious field to the extent that there is a powerful and abiding tradition of academic inquiry that has survived over the course of almost a century. It is manifest in both books, inviting the professional reader's scrutiny for markers of the evolution of that tradition. I myself write from within that interpretive tradition and am sympathetic to its aspirations for both the emotional weight of the stories it has to tell and the importance of those stories for understanding Americans. In 2008, I wrote a review essay defending immigration history against recent criticisms I felt were overdrawn and unfair.¹ But that does not mean that I regard the current writing of immigration history to be unproblematic or the field not in need of renewal.

Both of these gracefully written, well-conceived books, which are intended for lay readers and college surveys but are also useful summaries for scholars, have been published at a time when stock-taking in immigration historiography also has been urged from outside the field. The field has witnessed an enormous expansion of knowledge in the last four decades. But its basic interpretive assumptions and conceptual frameworks have increasingly been questioned. Scholars working in contemporary ethnic studies find immigration history's traditional preoccupation with the integration and assimilation of white Europeans, its East Coast bias, and its drawing excessively sharp distinctions between the experiences of the so-called Old Immigrants (Northern and Western Europeans) and New Immigrants (Southern and Eastern Europeans) to the relative neglect of non-European immigrants and to the West and Southwest, as well as of race and racialization more generally, has led to an inadequate picture of the formation of both American cultural diversity and American social pluralism. We might know better the European immigrants within their separate ethnicities as the result of such scholarship, it is contended; but when we cannot adequately conceive of those immigrants in the context of the racial fault lines of American society, we cannot really know America—for both the system of privileges and disabilities and the cultural identities by which American social order is formed and sustained will elude us. In the work of its most thoughtful advocates, who resist the emotional and ideological temptations of writing the history of comparative victimization, this is a powerful critique that needs to be taken seriously. To that extent, immigration history seems to be at a crossroads, in need of understanding what it has accomplished and what its next assignments might be. These two studies display at one and the same time the tremendous achievements of immigration history and of our need to consider its future direction.

Immigration history owes its origins to the intellectual reaction against nativist-driven anti-immigrant polemics, social work ethnography, and self-justifying phileopietism that, for better or worse, constituted the framework of immigration discourse in the United States at the turn of the last century. It was a reaction that took place simultaneously with the rise of professional academic scholarship in the social sciences and in history, which sought to displace just such moralization, political or philosophical, and replace it with truth determined by empirical methods. Moralizing did little...