6. Taking more than four years, the influential Dillingham Commission was responsible for a voluminous congressional report which concluded particular ethnic groups of immigrants risked the destruction of the American nation
Following sustained pressure from advocates of enhanced immigration controls during the early years of the 20th century, in 1907 Congress instituted the United States Immigration Commission. A bipartisan special committee chaired by Republican Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont, the joint committee comprised members of the both the House of Representatives and the Senate with the stated purpose of studying the origins and consequences of recent immigration trends. Concluding its work in 1911, the Dillingham Commission published an absurdly lengthy forty-one volume report; a planned forty-second volume was never completed.
Determining that immigration from southern and eastern Europe represented an existential threat to the United States, the commission recommended Congress enact a “literacy test as the most feasible single method of restricting undesirable immigration”. The nativist and xenophobic findings of the committee would influence legislation for years to come, being cited as the gold-standard throughout the 1920s. Dillingham, himself becoming a leading Progressive-era spokesperson against immigration, ardently supported his findings, continuing throughout the remainder of his tenure in Congress to champion the view that immigration by ethnic groups other than Anglo-Saxons posed a serious threat to the American nation.