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).
Every census misses some people, but those who are poor, male, urban, black, and Hispanic are most likely not to be counted. In 1980 and 1990, big city mayors complained that census undercounts were depriving their communities of their correct representation in Congress and of their fair share of state and federal dollars. The mayors filed lawsuits to demand recounts and statistical corrections to the census. Harvey Choldin tells the story of the conflict between Census Bureau staff and politicians over how to handle the undercount.
Statisticians at the census bureau were caught between their own rigorous scientific standards and these strong political demands. Choldin explains the political and statistical issues in the undercount controversy, and describes the major research and development program in which statisticians developed innovative techniques with which to measure and correct undercounts. He concludes by showing that, despite the undercount, the United States has an excellent census.
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