Making Race through Immigration Policy: The Science and Politics of the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report

The notion of race and ethnicity is central to contemporary immigration scholarship. Researchers routinely compare groups of different origins to assess their immigration trajectories and respective degrees of socio-economic integration. Less attention, however, has been paid to the historical origins of the classification and categorization in immigration. This paper argues that Dillingham Commission Report (1911) marks the pivotal moment, at least in the United States. Responding to the surge of nativism and increase in the number of immigrants and from southern and eastern Europe at the end of 19th century, the leading politicians and intellectuals of the time engaged in the task of classifying and categorizing immigrants: vast amount of statistical data on social and economic characteristics of immigrants within the U.S. were collected to promote a scientifically informed measure of immigration control.

Focusing on the data from the report concerning crime, welfare, and education of immigrants, this paper will display how racial and ethnic categories emerge out of raw data. The initial statistics conveys an extremely complex portrayal of immigrants, often divided by esoteric categories (such as “black Russians”) that are remote from our contemporary understanding of race and ethnicity. As report progresses to the synthesis and recommendation, however, the notions of “desirable” and “undesirable” immigrants emerge as an overarching principle of categorization, and the ensuing recommendation of promoting positive immigration leads to reaffirmation of the pervasive understandings of racial hierarchy. Endless stream of numbers and crosstables align behind this hierarchy to provide substances to racial categorization, and immigration policy follows this blueprint to shape national identity of the U.S. by implementing the national quota restrictions of 1924.   

Drawing from original archival evidences, I show how race, ethnicity, and national identity emerge out of statistical data, both through scientific reasoning and political struggle.