America Classifies the Immigrants : From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census - HBK

Harvard University Press

America Classifies the ImmigrantsFrom Ellis Island to the 2020 Census\nAuthor(s): Joel Perlmann\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Harvard University Press, United States\nImprint: Harvard University Press\nISBN-13: 9780674425057, 978-0674425057\nSynopsis\nWhen 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 consequentialwere Hebrews a race, a religion, or a people? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the governments 1897 List of Races and Peoples, which shaped exclusionary immigration laws, the wording of the [url] Census, and federal studies that informed social policy. Its categories served to maintain old divisions and establish new ones.\n\nAcross the five decades ending in the 1920s, American immigration policy b.