The Dillingham Commission
In 1907 the United States Congress formed a special, bipartisan committee to study the impact immigration had on the economy, culture, government, and security of the United States. The committee consisted of members from both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and over the course of four years it compiled information and conducted hearings which studied the causes of immigration, its impact on American communities and schools, and the impact on various industries. It also studied legislation on all levels as a result of immigration, crime and housing, public health issues, and religious impact.
The committee became known as the Dillingham Commission, from Chairman William Dillingham of Vermont, and in addition to the Senators and Congressmen also included William Wheeler, Commissioner of Immigration for the State of California. It also included Jeremiah Jenks, a professor of history and political science at Cornell University. Jenks and Daniel Folkmar, an anthropologist, collaborated on a work entitled the Dictionary of Races, a work intended to demonstrate whether some races are superior to others, and if so establish,”…whether some may be better fitted for American citizenship than others.” The work became part of the Commission’s final report to Congress.
When the Commission concluded its work in 1911, it issued 41 volumes of reports covering its research, statistics, analysis, and recommendations. Among the findings which it reported to Congress were higher rates of violent crime among foreign born in comparison to natives, a high rate of immigration for the means of immoral purposes (prostitution), a high concentration of immigrants in the poorest sections of major cities, and a slow rate of assimilation of immigrants into American culture, a process discouraged by immigrants of several nationalities, who preferred to retain their own. The Commission found this policy detrimental to the nation as a whole.
The Commission opined that the exclusion of Chinese immigrants should be continued, as well as restricting the immigration of Japanese and Koreans. It recommended that “an understanding should be reached with the British Government whereby East Indian laborers would be effectively prevented from coming to the United States.” The Commission found that a surplus of unskilled labor existed across American industry and agriculture, and recommended curtailing all immigration of unskilled labor, as well as excluding the illiterate regardless of language, and suggested a test of educational level be required for entry.
In addition to recommending the exclusion of Chinese and severely restricting entry of other Asians, the Commission found that immigrants from southern Europe (Italians and Greeks) and Eastern Europe (Slavs and Poles) posed a threat to American society, culture, and traditions, and recommended that their immigration to the United States be severely reduced, while those from Northern and Western Europe were far more likely to become assimilated into American society. The recommendations of the Dillingham Commission were used as guidelines by the Congress when writing immigration laws for the next several decades.