America classifies the immigrants : from Ellis Island to the 2020 census

Resource Information

The work America classifies the immigrants : from Ellis Island to the 2020 census represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

America classifies the immigrants : from Ellis Island to the 2020 census

Title remainder

from Ellis Island to the 2020 census

Statement of responsibility

Joel Perlmann

Creator

• Perlmann, Joel

Author

• Perlmann, Joel

Subject

• Race -- Classification | History
• Race -- Political aspects -- United States -- History
• Ethnic groups -- Classification | History
• United States -- Race relations | Political aspects | History
• United States, Bureau of the Census -- History
• United States -- Emigration and immigration | Government policy | History
• Ethnic groups -- Political aspects -- United States -- History

Language

eng

Summary

When more than twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920, the government attempted to classify them according to prevailing ideas about race and nationality. But this proved hard to do. Ideas about racial or national difference were slippery, contested, and yet consequential--were "Hebrews" a "race," a "religion," or a "people"? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the government's 1897 List of Races and Peoples, which shaped exclusionary immigration laws, the wording of the U.S. Census, and federal studies that informed social policy. Its categories served to maintain old divisions and establish new ones. Across the five decades ending in the 1920s, American immigration policy built increasingly upon the belief that some groups of immigrants were desirable, others not. Perlmann traces how the debates over this policy institutionalized race distinctions--between whites and nonwhites, but also among whites--in immigration laws that lasted four decades. Despite a gradual shift among social scientists from "race" to "ethnic group" after the 1920s, the diffusion of this key concept among government officials and the public remained limited until the end of the 1960s. Taking up dramatic changes to racial and ethnic classification since then, America Classifies the Immigrants concentrates on three crucial reforms to the American Census: the introduction of Hispanic origin and ancestry (1980), the recognition of mixed racial origins (2000), and a rethinking of the connections between race and ethnic group (proposed for 2020).--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

MH/DLC

Dewey number

325.73

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

JV6483

LC item number

.P45 2018

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography