Power  /  Antecedent

Not So Evident

How experts and their facts created immigration restriction.
Ellis Island by Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

My recent book, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard Univ. Press, 2018), explores the confluence of government social science expertise and “facts” in early 20th-century US immigration policy. From 1907 to 1911, the Dillingham Commission conducted the largest-ever study of immigrants in the United States, and it helped create the idea that immigration was a “problem” that (only) the federal government could and should “fix.”

The Dillingham Commission had nine appointed members: three senators, three congressmen, and three “experts” chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt. Jeremiah Jenks, a professor of economics at Cornell University, organized much of the work and has been called by historians of social science the first “government expert.” The commission and its staff visited or gathered data on all 46 states and several territories. A staff of more than 300 men and women compiled 41 volumes of reports, including a potent set of recommendations that shaped immigration policy for generations to come. The commission’s agents had advanced degrees from the Ivy Leagues and large public research institutions like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, and Berkeley. Economics degrees dominated, though others had degrees in sociology, law, medicine, political science, and anthropology (including Franz Boas, who wrote an important treatise on new immigrants’ bodies and head shapes for the commission). Twenty reports on immigrants in American industries formed the bulk of the work, but other volumes considered everything from conditions on transatlantic steamships to prostitution, debt peonage, crime, schools, agriculture, philanthropic societies, other countries’ immigration laws, and immigrant women’s “fecundity.”

Throughout the process, the commissioners insisted that they and the social scientists they hired were objective. In 1909, Massachusetts senator and commission member Henry Cabot Lodge defended the commission member most sympathetic to immigrants, Republican Congressman William S. Bennet, who represented Jewish Harlem. Bennet “is as determined as I am to get all the facts,” said Lodge. In the commission’s work, he insisted, “Bennet has not tried to suppress anything.” But what did objectivity mean for these men? Lodge was a true believer in social science; he earned one of Harvard’s first PhDs in history and government. He was also, in the words of immigration historian John Higham, the new immigrants’ “most dangerous adversary.” His fellow commissioner, California businessman William R. Wheeler, insisted that they wanted to “learn the facts.” The commission’s final report insisted that its conclusions would not be based on race or cultural considerations, but on the sound basis of economics and social science.