BACKGROUND: In 1907 the U.S. Congress created the Dillingham Commission, a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. To date this Commission remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States, with nine political appointees (four Republicans, three Democrats, and three unelected “experts”) heading a 300-member staff to study the issue. The result was a 41-volume study numbering more than 29,000 pages. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world.
REQUIRED PAPER PROMPT QUESTIONS: According to your reading of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s book Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy:
1. What specifically did individual members of the Dillingham Commission identify as ‘the immigrant problem(s),’ and what solutions did they suggest to address this problem(s), and why?
and,
2. Based on your reading and analysis of this book, what conclusions do you draw (the so what question/historical significance) about the people who worked on this Commission and the problems and solutions they identified?