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Author: Robert F. Zeidel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875803234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
The "Great American Problem" at the turn of the twentieth century was immigration. In the years after the Civil War, not only had the annual numbers of immigrants skyrocketed but the demographic mix had changed. These so-called new immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe; many were Catholics or Jews. Clustered in the slums, clinging to their homeland traditions, they drew suspicion. Rumors of a papist conspiracy and a wave of anti-Semitism swept the nation as rabid nativists crusaded--sometimes violently--for the elimination of 'foreigners'. In place of wholesale denunciation, wild theories, and impractical propositions, however, progressive reformers proposed the calm consideration of rational and practical measures. With their faith in social engineering, they believed that enlightened public policy would lead to prosperity and justice. Such was the hope of the Dillingham Commission, appointed by Congress in 1907 to investigate the immigrant problem. In Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, Robert Zeidel introduces the nine members of the Dillingham Commission, created by the Immigration Act of 1907, and shadows them from day to day, in the office, on board ship, at the inspection station. With every mile they traveled through Europe, with every form that their staff completed, the commissioners meticulously gathered facts. On every page of their 41-volume report, they sought to present those facts without bias. In general, the Dillingham Commission reached positive conclusions about immigrants. While it recommended a few restrictions, it did so primarily for economic--rather than cultural or "racial"--reasons. With the isolationist backlash after the Great War and in the face of the Red Scare, the commission saw its work hijacked. Compiled in the spirit of objectivity, the report was employed to justify purely nativist goals as the United States imposed stringent regulations limiting the number of immigrants from other countries. Prejudice trumped progressive idealism. As Zeidel demonstrates, social scientists in the 1920s learned what physicists would discover two decades later: scientists do not control the consequences of their research.
Author: Robert F. Zeidel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875803234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book Here
Book Description
The "Great American Problem" at the turn of the twentieth century was immigration. In the years after the Civil War, not only had the annual numbers of immigrants skyrocketed but the demographic mix had changed. These so-called new immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe; many were Catholics or Jews. Clustered in the slums, clinging to their homeland traditions, they drew suspicion. Rumors of a papist conspiracy and a wave of anti-Semitism swept the nation as rabid nativists crusaded--sometimes violently--for the elimination of 'foreigners'. In place of wholesale denunciation, wild theories, and impractical propositions, however, progressive reformers proposed the calm consideration of rational and practical measures. With their faith in social engineering, they believed that enlightened public policy would lead to prosperity and justice. Such was the hope of the Dillingham Commission, appointed by Congress in 1907 to investigate the immigrant problem. In Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, Robert Zeidel introduces the nine members of the Dillingham Commission, created by the Immigration Act of 1907, and shadows them from day to day, in the office, on board ship, at the inspection station. With every mile they traveled through Europe, with every form that their staff completed, the commissioners meticulously gathered facts. On every page of their 41-volume report, they sought to present those facts without bias. In general, the Dillingham Commission reached positive conclusions about immigrants. While it recommended a few restrictions, it did so primarily for economic--rather than cultural or "racial"--reasons. With the isolationist backlash after the Great War and in the face of the Red Scare, the commission saw its work hijacked. Compiled in the spirit of objectivity, the report was employed to justify purely nativist goals as the United States imposed stringent regulations limiting the number of immigrants from other countries. Prejudice trumped progressive idealism. As Zeidel demonstrates, social scientists in the 1920s learned what physicists would discover two decades later: scientists do not control the consequences of their research.
Author: Jeanne D. Petit
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580463487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Should immigrants have to pass a literacy test in order to enter the United States? Progressive-Era Americans debated this question for more than twenty years, and by the time the literacy test became law in 1917, the debate had transformed the way Americans understood immigration, and created the logic that shaped immigration restriction policies throughout the twentieth century. Jeanne Petit argues that the literacy test debate was about much more than reading ability or the virtues of education. It also tapped into broader concerns about the relationship between gender, sexuality, race, and American national identity. The congressmen, reformers, journalists, and pundits who supported the literacy test hoped to stem the tide of southern and eastern European immigration. To make their case, these restrictionists portrayed illiterate immigrant men as dissipated, dependent paupers, immigrant women as brood mares who bore too many children, and both as a eugenic threat to the nation's racial stock. Opponents of the literacy test argued that the new immigrants were muscular, virile workers and nurturing, virtuous mothers who would strengthen the race and nation. Moreover, the debaters did not simply battle about what social reformer Grace Abbott called "the sort of men and women we want." They also defined as normative the men and women they were -- unquestionably white, unquestionably American, and unquestionably fit to shape the nation's future. Jeanne D. Petit is Associate Professor of History at Hope College.
Author: Edward A. Koning
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487523424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Why do some governments try to limit immigrants' access to social benefits and entitlements while others do not? Through an in-depth study of Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands, Immigration and the Politics of Welfare Exclusion maps the politics of immigrants' social rights in Western democracies. To achieve this goal, Edward A. Koning analyzes policy documents, public opinion surveys, data on welfare use, parliamentary debates, and interviews with politicians and key players in the three countries. Koning's findings are three-fold. First, the politics of immigrant welfare exclusion have little to do with economic factors and are more about general opposition to immigration and multiculturalism. Second, proposals for exclusion are particularly likely to arise in a political climate that incentivizes politicians to appear "tough" on immigration. Finally, the success of anti-immigrant politicians in bringing about exclusionary reforms depends on the response of the political mainstream, and the extent to which immigrants' rights are protected in national and international legal frameworks. A timely investigation into an increasingly pressing subject, Immigration and the Politics of Welfare Exclusion will be essential reading for scholars and students of political science, comparative politics, and immigration studies.
Author: Gary Gerstle
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 161044244X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
The political involvement of earlier waves of immigrants and their children was essential in shaping the American political climate in the first half of the twentieth century. Immigrant votes built industrial trade unions, fought for social protections and religious tolerance, and helped bring the Democratic Party to dominance in large cities throughout the country. In contrast, many scholars find that today's immigrants, whose numbers are fast approaching those of the last great wave, are politically apathetic and unlikely to assume a similar voice in their chosen country. E Pluribus Unum? delves into the wealth of research by historians of the Ellis Island era and by social scientists studying today's immigrants and poses a crucial question: What can the nation's past experience teach us about the political path modern immigrants and their children will take as Americans? E Pluribus Unum? explores key issues about the incorporation of immigrants into American public life, examining the ways that institutional processes, civic ideals, and cultural identities have shaped the political aspirations of immigrants. The volume presents some surprising re-assessments of the past as it assesses what may happen in the near future. An examination of party bosses and the party machine concludes that they were less influential political mobilizers than is commonly believed. Thus their absence from today's political scene may not be decisive. Some contributors argue that the contemporary political system tends to exclude immigrants, while others remind us that past immigrants suffered similar exclusions, achieving political power only after long and difficult struggles. Will the strong home country ties of today's immigrants inhibit their political interest here? Chapters on this topic reveal that transnationalism has always been prominent in the immigrant experience, and that today's immigrants may be even freer to act as dual citizens. E Pluribus Unum? theorizes about the fate of America's civic ethos—has it devolved from an ideal of liberal individualism to a fractured multiculturalism, or have we always had a culture of racial and ethnic fragmentation? Research in this volume shows that today's immigrant schoolchildren are often less concerned with ideals of civic responsibility than with forging their own identity and finding their own niche within the American system of racial and ethnic distinction. Incorporating the significant influx immigrants into American society is a central challenge for our civic and political institutions—one that cuts to the core of who we are as a people and as a nation. E Pluribus Unum? shows that while today's immigrants and their children are in some ways particularly vulnerable to political alienation, the process of assimilation was equally complex for earlier waves of immigrants. This past has much to teach us about the way immigration is again reshaping the nation.
Author: Roger Daniels
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520219502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
"The years have failed to dull the sheen of this slender volume. Its thick subject matters—regionalism, racial politics, democracy—have taken on different casts over the life of the book, yet they retain their relevance and timeliness."—Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Margins and Mainstreams "The insights offered by Roger Daniels almost four decades ago remain trenchant and incisive."—Sucheng Chan, author of This Bittersweet Soil
Author: Thomas C. Leonard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175861
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and 'mental defectives, ' whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity. Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them. -- Provided by publisher.
Author: Ronald Hayduk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415950724
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Katherine Benton-Cohen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674985648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: 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.
Author: Gwendolyn Mink
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Author: Lisa Magaña
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816542244
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Empowered!examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. It also provides a distilled reflection of U.S. politics more broadly, where the politics of exclusion and the desire for inclusion are forces of change. Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva argue that the state of Arizona is more inclusive and progressive then it has ever been. Following in the footsteps of grassroots organizers in California and the southeastern states, Latinos in Arizona have struggled and succeeded to alter the anti-immigrant and racist policies that have been affecting Latinos in the state for many years. Draconian immigration policies have plagued Arizona’s political history. Empowered! shows innovative ways that Latinos have fought these policies. Empowered! focuses on the legacy of Latino activism within politics. It raises important arguments about those who stand to profit financially and politically by stoking fear of immigrants and how resilient politicians and grassroots organizers have worked to counteract that fear mongering. Recognizing the long history of disenfranchisement and injustice surrounding minority communities in the United States, this book outlines the struggle to make Arizona a more just and equal place for Latinos to live.
