Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy

by Katherine Benton-Cohen

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts―women and men trained in the new field of social science―fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later.

Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations―including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy―were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics.

The Dillingham Commission―which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States―reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, American History

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 7, 2018

About the author

Katherine Benton-Cohen is associate professor of history at Georgetown University. She previously taught at Louisiana State University. She is the author of two books, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009), and Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard University Press, 2018). She also served as historical advisor to the documentary feature film, Bisbee ’17, directed by Robert Greene. Benton-Cohen has received research fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and elsewhere. She currently serves as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She and her work have appeared in media outlets including PBS American Experience, the BBC, Dissent, the New Yorker, Politico.com, Reuters, and the Washington Post. In 2018, she was named as an OAH-Japanese Association for American Studies Resident Fellow at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. An Arizona native, Benton-Cohen is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, with master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Leena · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Dillingham Commission emphasized problems, data, and exclusion in its recommendations; it avoided praise, alternate explanations, or the promotion of federal efforts at assimilating immigrants. To this day, the United States has a federal immigration policy, but no assimilation or integration policy. A version of the literary tests survives in our citizenship exams, and our immigration system is still undergirded by a numerical quota system... Above all, the idea of immigration as a "problem" for the federal government to fix has become so obvious across the political spectrum that it is almost impossible to question."

I ordered this book to learn more about the history of immigration policy in our country. I am not an academic or social scientist. I'm just a person who is casually interested in reading history books. And I hope more folks pick up this book because it's informative and interesting.

The bulk of this book focuses on how the Dillingham Commission went about their work. Because there are so many issues with that, the results were less than reliable. Not that they listened to their own research anyway. As I'm sure no one is shocked to know, the leaders basically wrote up their recommendations however they wished, regardless of if they contradicted their research. It's difficult to summarize because it's complicated. But if you have an opinion on the immigration issues of today, you'd be better served to have a more in-depth understanding of how we got here.

I found myself especially intrigued with the questions of sex workers/trafficking (which we still don't know how to deal with), the POV of the Progressive movement within the government (and its effect on Capitalism), the effect of the emergence of social science, and how Capitalists basically made/attempted to make to the shift to immigrant workers when slavery ended. I also enjoyed the chapter on women who worked on the commission. Overall, this book made me want to delve far further into U.S. history.

My one small qualm was the repeated use of the phrase, "Famously..." which then referenced something I knew nothing about. It made me feel a tad ignorant. But hey. It gave me the opportunity to look things up.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A necessary read for scholars of United States history, and a crucial one for anyone interested in the trajectory of American immigration policy.

Katherine Benton-Cohen has presented the work of the Dillingham Commission as the basis for conceptualizing immigration to the United States as a problem rather than a question. In analyzing this transition, Benton-Cohen explores long overlooked aspects of the Dillingham Commission. The question of whether or not "Hebrew" was a sufficient racial classification had a large impact on how government officials classified (and later, restricted) immigrant populations. The sheer number of educated women (many with graduate degrees) who worked for the Dillingham Commission reveals an interesting development in federal employment that was at odds with the political freedom of American women. The size and scope of Frank Boas' study for the Dillingham Commission, involving the intrusive measurement of immigrants' bodies, has as much to say about the ways that immigrants were taken advantage of as it does about nativist preoccupations with how the growing numbers of non-Anglo Saxon peoples would affect the constitution of the American populace.

Of particular interest is the chapter, "Not a Question of Too Many Immigrants," which focuses on what Benton-Cohen calls "Little-Italy-in-Dixie" (p. 205). In spite of the fact that the Sunnyside Plantation represented concerted efforts by American officials to coerce Italian immigrants into agricultural work, it hardly figured into the Dillingham Commission's "peonage report." The existence of Sunnyside and its erasure from the historical record is illuminating for reasons racial, ethnic, and political.

As previously mentioned, the spotlight that Benton-Cohen shines on trailblazing women such as Anna Herkner, Mary Philbrook, Juliet Stuart Points, and Mary Quackenbos is, in and of itself, an important historical contribution.

Out of a particularly large corpus of sources, Benton-Cohen has crafted a book as readable as it is informative. Timely and evocative.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Created in 1907, the Dillingham Commission conducted an extensive survey of immigration in the United States. The resulting reports consists of forty-one detail packed volumes (all of which are online). Benton-Cohen analyzes these volumes and the men and women, methods, conclusions, and biases behind them. The reports are invaluable to constructing a picture of immigrant and American life in the period. What did the Commission do with all this information? They argued that immigration was a problem, requiring a federal solution. The ultimate result was the National Origins Acts of the 1920s and immigration restriction. This is very timely reading.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished after a month.

3.75 stars

This was an interesting read into a part of history I knew nothing about and its impact on immigration discussions. It was a bit tedious to read at times (why it took me so long to read) but still informative. It is definitely more of an academic read and its organization at times was a bit confusing.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I'm not entirely convinced by Benton-Cohen's arguments (especially that the Dillingham Commission was not as motivated by racism and eugenics as they posthoc have been asserted to have been), the book offers many interesting insights into the commission and the construction of immigration policy in the United States.

[Geoff Walling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story, but hard to read.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting as an intellectual, institutional, and policy history. Essential for anyone interesting in immigration history

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to take the Commission seriously bc Dillingham is so silly sounding

[alexa koe · Rating 2 out of 5]

interesting concept but not interesting enough to read an entire book on. a look at the dillingham commission and how their conclusions became the basis of modern american immigration policy. fascinating to learn how various scientifically-minded people justified increased immigration control for a variety of reasons, particularly economic ones (still very relevant!)