In the nineteenth century, virtually anyone could get into the
United States. But by the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy had become
a finely filtered regime of selection. Desmond King looks at this
dramatic shift, and the debates behind it, for what they reveal
about the construction of an "American" identity.
Specifically, the debates in the three decades leading up to
1929 were conceived in terms of desirable versus undesirable
immigrants. This not only cemented judgments about specific
European groups but reinforced prevailing biases against groups
already present in the United States, particularly African
Americans, whose inferior status and second-class
citizenship--enshrined in Jim Crow laws and embedded in
pseudo-scientific arguments about racial classifications--appear to
have been consolidated in these decades. Although the values of
different groups have always been recognized in the United States,
King gives the most thorough account yet of how eugenic arguments
were used to establish barriers and to favor an Anglo-Saxon
conception of American identity, rejecting claims of other
traditions. Thus the immigration controversy emerges here as a
significant precursor to recent multicultural debates.
"Making Americans" shows how the choices made about immigration
policy in the 1920s played a fundamental role in shaping democracy
and ideas about group rights in America.
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