Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen Jeanne Petit Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 342. Photographs, notes, index.) Katherine Benton-Cohen seeks to understand the meaning and legacy of the Dillingham Commission, the three-year congressional study of immigration that began in 1907 and issued its report and recommendations in 1911. She faced a significant challenge in writing this book. The main source is a massive, multivolume government report with thousands of pages of statistics and graphs, but there is little documentation of how the report was created because the papers of the Dillingham Commission were not preserved. Benton-Cohen finds a solution to this dilemma by concentrating on an array of men and women—social scientists, reformers, religious leaders, politicians, and others—who sought to shape the report’s findings and recommendations. In the process, she argues, those who participated in the Dillingham Commission competed to create a framework for understanding migration to the United States, ultimately creating a powerful and consequential vision of the “immigration problem.” While many historians recognize the significance of the Dillingham Commission in justifying immigration restriction, Benton-Cohen examines how participants used complex and competing political, economic, and ideological arguments to shape the report. One interesting insight here is how, perhaps not surprisingly, the work of the commission created unexpected political bedfellows. For instance, while many Jewish lobbyists advocated for Judaism to be labeled a religion, Zionists agreed with the restrictionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that Jews should be classified as a distinct “Hebrew race.” Moreover, Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff advocated for the redistribution of Jewish immigrants to Texas to counter criticism about their concentration in the New York area. This idea was likewise promoted by Mississippi Senator LaRoy Percy, who wanted to address what he called “the Negro problem” by replacing [End Page 483] low-wage African American agricultural workers in Mississippi with Italian immigrants. A central theme throughout the book is that those with different views on immigration shared a belief in the expanded use of federal power to achieve their goals. Many commissioners used their authority to pry into the personal lives of individuals, particularly vulnerable people. Jett Lauke, a “practical economist” (108) who led an expansive investigation of industrial conditions for the commission, coerced workers in steel towns to answer personal questions about employment history, savings, and even grocery bills. He used the report to argue that the federal government should exclude immigrants to protect what he called “the vanishing American wage earner.” Anthropologist Franz Boas made the opposite argument, that immigrants should not be excluded because they assimilated into what he called “the American type.” To make this case, he, too, used federal authority to get schools to allow him to measure the skulls and other physical features of children. The author includes an entire chapter on each of Lauke’s and Boas’s concepts of American types. Another contribution this book makes is to demonstrate how the Dillingham Commission offered opportunities for those on the periphery of power to shape perceptions of migration. These figures include Yamato Ichihashi, a Japanese immigrant who offered sympathetic portraits of Japanese farmers in California. They also include social worker Anna Herkner, who went undercover on shipping vessels to examine the conditions immigrant women faced. She successfully advocated for a federal law limiting immigrants in steerage. At the same time, Benton-Cohen shows that powerful figures like Henry Cabot Lodge had the ability to shape the final recommendations, which portrayed immigration as a problem to be solved through restriction. Through a focus on historical actors, the author demonstrates the multiple ways Progressive-Era Americans created the “immigration problem” and reimagined the ways federal policy could deal with it. As Benton-Cohen points out, the Dillingham Commission’s legacy shapes the way we understand immigration policy to this day. Jeanne Petit Hope College Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association