Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen (review)

Immigration controversies are a recurring obsession of American politicians, lawmakers, and voters. Subverting the celebratory tone conveyed in its image as a "nation of immigrants," the United States has in practice engaged in involuntary immigration and periodically pilloried immigrants and potential immigrants. A new crescendo of anti-immigrant bile has been unleashed in the presidency of Donald Trump with crude characterizations of immigrants from South America and Africa, sustained deportation drives, and executive orders to exclude immigrants from several Muslim countries and to deprive undocumented migrants of the right to seek asylum. The policy and legal initiatives are in flux, under test in the federal judiciary, but the executive-led sentiment is unremittingly hostile. Such an atmosphere has many historical echoes in the political development of the United States since its creation.

The key earlier historical period is the 1880s to the 1920s when anti-immigrant sentiment and policy restriction surged as the proportion of foreign-born residents of the United States reached over 10 percent of the population. It is this period which is the setting for Katherine Benton-Cohen's compelling and important new study, aptly entitled Inventing the Immigration Problem. These decades, initiated in bans on Chinese and then Japanese workers, were febrile as notions of race, nation, and assimilability nurtured a sense of America as a white nation for white Americans and white immigrants. Whiteness was both discretionary, denied to southern and eastern Europeans, and material, an instrument of wage advancement in labor markets. The result of these mobilizations against immigrants was the restrictive national origins–based reforms enacted in 1924 and operative from 1929.

In the middle of this period, in 1907, Congress created the Dillingham Commission, which issued a massive forty-one volume report in 1911. The commission is at the center of Benton-Cohen's book. The chair, Vermont senator William P. Dillingham, gave the enquiry its eponymous title.

The Dillingham Commission was an impressive display of federal investigative power. The commission's membership consisted of three congressmen and three senators afforced with three key expert staff who drew on the work of over two dozen experts in economics, social work, anthropology, statistics, and labor relations amongst others as part of a staff nearing three hundred. The main players were relentlessly male but "women made up more than half of the commission's workforce and authored several of the reports" (p. 4). Despite the subtlety and nuance of many of its findings about immigrants and immigrant life in America, the commission's findings were taken instantly as defining the "immigration problem," as Benton-Cohen expertly demonstrates, and its recommendations for restrictions by national origins and by tests such as a literacy criterion enjoyed favor in Congress and defined America's immigration regime until 1965. The years between 1924 and 1965 witnessed a dramatic reduction in annual numbers of immigrants and an explicit settlement about who belonged. This settlement excluded African Americans. At its annual conferences in the late 1910s and 1920s, the NAACP denounced the increasingly restrictionist turn in federal immigration policy and had no illusions about how American nationalists sutured racial segregation and immigration exclusion in their vision of the nation. Dillingham purposefully ignored African Americans and African immigrants as inconceivable subjects for their commission's work. It essentially overlooked and forgot about Mexicans. Asia was different and the West Coast anxieties already salient resulted in several volumes about Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian migrants, consistently drawing unfavorable conclusions about the assimilability or desirability of such groups.

Benton-Cohen's important argument is that the Dillingham Commission and its context marks the period when immigration found expression as a "problem" in U.S. politics and society. As she explains, "conceiving of immigration as a 'problem' in America was an invention, and one deeply embedded in the way that both bureaucrats and elites saw the relationship between social science and public policy in the Progressive...