Other Immigrants: Mexicans and the Dillingham Commission of 1907-1911

Abstract

FROM 1880 UNTIL THE QUOTA restrictions of 1921 and 1924, nearly twenty-four million immigrants came to the United States. The United States Immigration Commission (also known as the Dillingham Commission) met from 1907 to 1911 to study the resulting “immigration problem.” The Commission’s review of the period from 1898–1910 found southern Italians to be the largest group of migrants to the United States, “Hebrews” second. At a time when 90 percent of immigrants were born in Europe, it may be little wonder that the Commission focused on immigrants from that continent. But another large group of immigrants was crossing a border and entering the United States by land. How did national policy makers and intellectuals think about Mexican immigrants in the era of mass European migration? With Mexicans ranking only twenty-eighth of thirty-nine immigrant groups listed by the Dillingham Commission, the Commission failed to incorporate Mexicans into a larger understanding of migration. Mexicans accordingly occupied an exceptional place in immigration policy. Their numbers were small. They were geographically isolated, and southwestern employers lobbied to exempt Mexican labor from immigration restrictions. The policies that emerged from the Commission’s recommendations—both the literacy test of 1917 and the quota system begun in 1921—worked in different ways to exempt Mexicans. Mexicans did not fit into conceptual frameworks based on European immigration. Nor did they elicit the panic that Asian migration did. Over the last decade, historians have debated James Barrett and David Roediger’s argument characterizing southern and eastern Europeans as “inbetween peoples.” Mexicans were perhaps the quintessential “inbetween” people. Mexicans were both legally white and functionally nonwhite, welcomed and reviled, criticized and neglected, understudied and overlooked. Even when Mexicans made their way into the statistical data of the Commission’s reports, they were underrepresented in textual analysis.