America classifies the immigrants : from Ellis Island to the 2020 census / Joel Perlmann.

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).--

Includes bibliographies and index.

Creating and refining the list, 1898-1906 -- Immigration-especially European-through the lens of race -- Struggle over the list: the Jewish challenges and the federal defense, 1898-1910 -- The United States Immigration Commission, 1907-1911 -- Urging the list on the U.S. Census Bureau, 1908-1910 -- The census bureau goes its own way: race, nationality, mother tongue, 1910-1913 -- The second quota act, 1924 -- Immigration law for white races and others: three episodes -- From "race" to "ethnic group": organizing concepts in American studies of immigrants, 1890-1960 -- From social science to the federal bureaucracy?: limited diffusion of the "ethnic group" concept through the early 1950s -- Race and the immigrant in federal statistics after 1965.

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