Overview

Reveals the surprising historical roots of US immigration policy and discourse. Unfortunately, we're all too familiar with the US's legacy of maligning immigrants. Some Americans see immigrants as inherently threatening, a blank screen onto which the nation's worst fears are projected. But this phenomenon is neither timeless nor static. Instead, it arose and transformed alongside the unprecedented arrival of immigrants in the early twentieth century—and the federal government's response. In The Unruly Facts of Race, sociologist Sunmin Kim explains how American ideas about race and ethnicity were transformed in the early twentieth century as an unintended consequence of anti-immigrant mobilization. Kim presents a wealth of archival evidence, including the proceedings of the 1907 Dillingham Commission, to reconstruct how competing racialized visions of nationhood evolved in the early twentieth-century immigration debate. Immigration restrictionist politicians believed that the United States should be a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant nation. However, when they mobilized researchers—some of whom were women and/or immigrants—to gather data at a massive scale to rationalize their aims, they were met with unruly facts that did not support their racial project. Newer European immigrants, as the data showed, were not much different from descendants of earlier immigrants from northern Europe. When facts failed to support the vilification of immigrants, exclusionist politicians instead turned to race as a marker of ineluctable difference to justify their aims. This led to a new principle of national belonging: the United States transitioned to a country that encompassed various European groups, including Catholics and Jews, but excluded non-White immigrants, as they were deemed too different to become a part of the nation. Kim's analysis shows that throughout US history, the opportunity for belonging for some immigrants was predicated on the exclusion of others. His focus on the role of facts in the early twentieth century provides a refreshing take on why the so-called ""nation of immigrants"" has always demonized some immigrants while cherishing others, highlighting the selection and control of immigrants as the core principles of the American nation-building project. Amid a vitriolic explosion of American immigration discourse, Kim offers a needed corrective to and context for debates around who belongs in the United States.

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9780226845920

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Reviews

""A brilliant and multifaceted account of the messy and contentious process of race-making. Kim deftly illustrates how the Dillingham Commission’s quest to establish a coherent racial classification scheme was continually subverted by competing definitions and understandings of race among Commission members, staff, and researchers. In this quarrelsome context, Kim convincingly demonstrates how new social science concepts of race, ethnicity, and culture emerged to emphasize the potential of immigrant assimilation.""   -- Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley ""Why do we distinguish between race and ethnicity?  Why are some immigrants deemed assimilable and others undesirable?  In this deeply researched and keenly analyzed book of historical sociology, Kim traces our habits of thought and practice to the Dillingham Commission and the wayward facts it amassed, unintentionally undermining racial essentialism and ushering in racial liberalism. Calling for a world beyond both, The Unruly Facts of Race is eye-opening, insightful, and all too timely."" -- Moon-Kie Jung, author of 'Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present'

Author Information

Sunmin Kim is assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth College.  

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