{"product_id":"america-classifies-the-immigrants-9780674425057","title":"America Classifies the Immigrants","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoel Perlmann traces the history of U.S. classification of immigrants, from Ellis Island to the present day, showing how slippery and contested ideas about racial, national, and ethnic difference have been. His focus ranges from the 1897 List of Races and Peoples, through changes in the civil rights era, to proposals for reform of the 2020 Census.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA work of exacting scholarship and exemplary good sense. Perlmann illuminates as no other scholar has the process by which Americans decided how to classify immigrants. His account offers a much richer and more complex picture of the story than is found in any other work of historical writing. -- David A. Hollinger, author of \u003ci\u003ePostethnic America\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerlmann transforms our understanding of the history of government efforts to racially classify immigrants to the United States. He unearths a number of fascinating discoveries about a history that many thought was already well-known. His book will be essential reading for all serious scholars of immigration. -- Mara Loveman, author of \u003ci\u003eNational Colors\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe cannot understand America unless we understand race and immigration. To truly comprehend how these two histories overlap and intertwine, we need look no further than the United States government’s struggle to define, categorize, and count immigrants and members of racial and ethnic groups. It is Perlmann’s brilliant achievement to take what has too often been written as separate stories and tell it as one still unfinished story. -- Kenneth Prewitt, former Director of the United States Census Bureau, 1998–2000, and author of \u003ci\u003eWhat Is \u003cu\u003eYour\u003c\/u\u003e Race?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA readable and sophisticated discussion of the context of social science thinking about race, ethnicity, and national origins for official statistics on immigrant origins…A panoramic survey. It is a deeply researched and captivating book…Provides rich insights into the ways in which immigrants have been classified in America. -- Barry Edmonston * Population and Development Review *\u003cbr\u003eWe can learn a lot from [this] book about how conflicting agendas, behemoth ambitions, and unwarranted optimism produced classification schemes that negatively affected the lives of millions of Americans and would-be immigrants. We might do well to pair that knowledge with a stronger sense of humility than our forbearers held as we move forward in our own research. -- Jessica H. Lee * Journal of Urban History *\u003cbr\u003eA cogent and compelling analysis of the muddle of meanings embedded in the terms race, peoples, national origins, and mother tongue as used by scholars, politicians, and administrators in the Bureau of Immigration and the U.S. Census Bureau. -- Glenn C. Altschuler * Forward *\u003cbr\u003eAn insightful examination of how the US adopted and revised categories of immigrants over almost 150 years…Well researched and lucidly presented. * Choice *\u003cbr\u003ePerlmann provides us with a brilliant historical account of how Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Jews, were thought about, classified, and rendered legible by the state. -- Michael Omi * American Journal of Sociology *\u003cbr\u003eA work of deep erudition, impressive for its temporal scope but no less because breadth does not come at the expense of a fine-grained account of governmental classificatory practices. The key episodes selected by the author allow us to probe what it means that immigration policy was propelled by official acts of discrimination…Meticulously written, clear, and provocative—a book not to be missed. -- David Cook-Martín * International Migration Review *\u003cbr\u003eA well-written, compelling analysis of how the U.S. statistical system grappled with the increasing heterogeneity of the origins of immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants from the turn of the 20th century to the present. It is a story that tells us as much (or more) about America—including its political decisions, the federal bureaucracy, attitudes toward race, and the social sciences over this period—as it does about the immigrants themselves. -- Barry R. Chiswick * Studies in Contemporary Jewry *","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49403592376663,"sku":"9780674425057","price":37.36,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780674425057.jpg?v=1730483919","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/america-classifies-the-immigrants-9780674425057","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}