The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate

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