Abstract
While many have written about the history of census racial categories, and while some have explored the issue of how immigration offices classified migrants at the turn of the twentieth century, little has been written about how these processes might have been connected. By digging deeply into various official records and personal archives, Joel Perlmann provides census and immigration scholars with a valuable history yet untold. Classifying the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census is the most thorough and detailed account of immigrant categorization published to date, and it raises several important questions about the nature of the racial state and the principles that undergird bureaucratic conceptions of race, ethnicity, and heritage.
Classifying the Immigrants is divided into four parts. The first and most detailed section examines how bureaucrats within the U.S. Office of Immigration adopted a list of immigrant “races and peoples” at the turn of the twentieth century. Perlmann shows that this list did not emerge from heated and deliberative policy discussions; nor was it imposed by powerful politicians. Instead, the list was born from the mundane—it was created by bureaucrats to resolve disagreements between clerks at Ellis Island who struggled to list newcomers’ “nationality.” Inconsistencies quickly emerged: should clerks label someone “Russian” or “Russian Polish”? “Spanish,” or “Galician,” or “Galician Hebrew”? The difficulties reflected not only the fact that immigrants came from multinational empires, but also that clerks were unsure whether religion, language, and region were proper ways of capturing immigrant “origin.”
The list also reflected the loose ways in which terms like race, nation, and peoplehood were used interchangeably in the era. The initial New York list was eventually elongated and transformed when immigration officials institutionalized it at the federal level. This led to congressional inquiries that quickly devolved into discussions about the nature of racial difference. Figures like Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, attempted to push a set of (racist) ideas about how Anglos should be categorized distinctly from other Europeans. Jewish leaders also had their say, and pushed back on the idea that “Hebrew” and religion more broadly should be a form of racial classification. In the end, the list remained uneven and inconsistent, reflective of both the practical difficulties involved in asking people about their origin and the various political interests and ideologies that eventually channeled bureaucratic actions. Thus, some regions, like Europe, were sliced into infinitely tiny categories while other regions, like Africa, were homogenized and lumped together.
But even as immigration officials held hearings and debated issues of race and nation, census officials carried out their duties according to a different logic. Steeped within a black/white binary, census officials resisted calls to slice up the white/European category. Specifically, census officials contended that “color” was distinct from the type of distinctions that immigration officials documented in their list of races. In effect, Perlmann shows that attempts to standardize thinking about the racial and ethnic heritage of immigrants and citizens failed early on in part because these organizations operated with different understandings about the difference between race, ethnicity, color, and nationality.
The second section of the book examines how racial categories were institutionalized in immigration policy in the 1920s. Here Perlmann details how the “list of races” went on to influence discussions about which groups would be allowed to migrate as Senators debated how to place quotas on different racial categories. Congress eventually settled on defining nationality mainly as the “place of citizenship” to inform the National Origins Act.
The third section of the book provides broader context and looks at academic debates about race, ethnicity, and nation in the 1940s and 1950s. Perlmann traces how U.S. academics moved from describing Europeans as races to thinking of them as ethnic groups. This ethnic understanding allowed them to write about the differences between European groups and about the more rigid racial distinctions between blacks, whites, and Asians. This academic shift paralleled a broader international shift in the wake of Nazi Germany to use ethnicity instead of race to describe differences within Europe.
A final and smaller portion of the book takes us from the 1960s to the 2020 census. This part examines how the federal government standardized racial and ethnic statistics in the 1970s in order to bring some order across agencies and assert the existence of five racial categories and one ethnicity (Hispanic). At the heart of this effort was the work of civil rights activists who demanded that their communities be counted fairly and classified accurately. At the same time, the abolition of the quota system and the passage of the Hart-Celler Act diversified the U.S. immigrant population and, Perlmann suggests, led Congress to endorse and reinforce a more simplified racial categorical schema for counting the U.S. population.
Overall, Classifying the Immigrants provides readers with the most extensive analysis of U.S. immigrant classification written to date. When assessed alongside other work on the census, the book motivates scholars to ask new questions about the nature of racial taxonomies and classification struggles more broadly. By giving us an inside view of the various agencies, actors, and racial logics that have been historically at play in the United States, Perlmann moves us closer to understanding the contradictory, inconsistent, and yet enduring nature of race. This book should be required reading for all scholars interested in understanding the mechanics of the racial state.