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

The notion that immigration is the nation's problem that should be fixed by the federal government may surprise few people in the United States today. In this new book, however, Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the American public hardly took for granted such a view of immigration and the federal government's role until the early twentieth century. It instead was an invention—a product of American Progressivism characterized by governmental officials' and elite scholars' belief in the abilities of nascent modern social science to guide public policy and by the expansion of federal power within and beyond the territory of the nation. Central to this invention was the subject of this book, the so-called Dillingham Commission, which was created by Congress in 1907 to study the unprecedented volume of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. By analyzing the Commission's massive investigations, as well as the policy recommendations based on them, Benton-Cohen demonstrates that the Dillingham Commission established and perpetuated the view of immigration as a problem, especially an economic one, for the national government to solve. This conception of immigration set the groundwork for the creation of a federal bureaucracy to administer immigration, and has lain at the core of the federal government's approach to the subject ever since. In this sense, the Dillingham Commission played a pivotal role in the history of American immigration policy.

Benton-Cohen deserves commendation for offering a long over-due study of the Dillingham Commission. The commission is so well known among U.S. historians for the influence of its racism and nativism on federal immigration policy that virtually every single book touching upon immigration during the Progressive Era refers to the commission. Yet as Benton-Cohen points out, it usually makes only brief "cameo appearances" and there are very few sustained studies of the commission (8). As a result, historians have monolithic and superficial understandings of the commission and its relationship with federal immigration policy. Perhaps more problematically, the profiles of people who participated in the commission and their views of immigration have remained obscure, even for immigration historians. By carefully tracing the creation of the commission and anatomizing the ideas and careers of individuals who took part in the investigations of the Dillingham Commission, this book deepens our understanding of the commission and its significance for American history.

Social historians will find Benton-Cohen's methodology particularly inspiring. To examine the inner workings and activities of the Dillingham Commission, Benton-Cohen combines the biography of central figures for the commission with policy history based on an integrated analysis of the commission's official reports, scattered paperwork by the commission, and the personal papers of commission members and staff collected at more than two dozen archives. The result is an exceptionally rich social history of the state and bureaucracy, a mode of scholarship which is increasingly important in the field of American immigration policy history. While previous scholars who have written history of this sort tended to focus on particular immigration laws or law enforcement agencies, Benton-Cohen's study stands out for setting people who created the laws as the principal subjects for inquiry. The book's examination of the linkages among individual officials, state power, politics, and law should serve as a model for social historians studying public policy.

Many historians will value this book for filling historiographical gaps and providing methodological models for future research, but the book's most important achievement lies in its arguments. The thematically organized chapters of the book fundamentally revise or correct many of the prevailing assumptions about the Dillingham Commission. For example, historians have long attributed the foundation of the commission to growing immigration from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century alone. Benton-Cohen, however, reveals how concerns about Japanese immigration played a decisive role in the commission's creation, claiming that it was "a direct...