Welcome to Module 12! In this module, we'll continue to explore naturalization in the early 20th century. We’ll examine two Supreme Court cases which became especially significant for Asian immigrants attempting to become US citizens. Additionally, we’ll assess the citizenship case of Timoteo Andrade. Then, we'll move into an assessment of the experiences of immigrants in the early twentieth century and their interactions with social reformers, known as "Progressives."
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Three questions will guide this module blog post:
How did definitions of whiteness impact the ability of immigrants to secure American citizenship in the early twentieth century?
What was the place for women in the American citizenry in the early twentieth century and how did women interact with the state?
How and why did American citizens in the Progressive Era seek to impose order on their lives during a time of cultural upheaval and change?
Let's get started!
Part I: Naturalization Laws (Part II)
In the court cases covered in Part I, we’ll see the ways in which the state and immigrants themselves attempted to use the racial ideologies of the day, rooted in “scientific” assumptions about nationalities, culture, and race, in order to claim whiteness.
Word Cloud #1:
In the early twentieth century, what did it mean to be white? Enter a response in the word cloud below, or access it here.
Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922)
The first Supreme Court case was brought by Takao Ozawa. Ozawa emigrated from Japan in 1894. He attended high school and college in Berkeley, California. He moved to Honolulu in 1906, got married and had two children, whom he sent to American schools. He worked for an American company, spoke English fluently, and identified as an American, including religiously—he was a Christian and his family attended an American church. He argued that he was loyal to the US, had assimilated into American culture, and physically, he was pale—essentially, he claimed he was white.
Ozawa also claimed that Japanese people like himself had adapted Western values and modernity, and were very assimilable. He claimed, “What really counts in humanity is home influence and education, and where the ideals are high, racial type is of little moment.” [1]
The Supreme Court denied Ozawa’s application for citizenship. They argued that he was an exemplary person with good moral character. But, just because he was assimilated socially and culturally, he still wasn’t “white.” The Court used a scientific definition of whiteness, claiming that because he was not a member of the “Caucasian” race, rather he was “Mongoloid,” he could not be considered white, and therefore, remained an alien ineligible for US citizenship. [While an offensive term today, "mongoloid" was the term applied to a broad array of people from Asia at this moment in time.]
The Court stated, “Since an almost unbroken line of decisions in federal and state courts…held that “white person” meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race, Japanese cannot be Caucasian because they are not white.” [2]
In Ozawa, the court sought to reconcile the popular understanding of whiteness with the so-called “scientific” definition of race. The case did not define “whiteness” completely, but it did ultimately resolve that Japanese immigrants were not white, and thus not eligible for American citizenship.
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923)
The next year, Bhagat Singh Thind took his citizenship case to the Supreme Court. Thind had come to the US from Punjab in 1913. He had served the US in World War I, and wrote his brief from Camp Lewis, Washington, where he was stationed with the US Army. He placed the bulk of his argument for citizenship on the grounds that scientifically, he was white based on his “Caucasian” roots. He argued, “Speaking literally, color cannot be the only test of the white or Caucasian race; strictly speaking no one is white…the true test of race is blood or descent.”
The Court dismissed his argument, conceding that he may be scientifically classified as “Caucasian,” but in the popular conception there was no way he could be viewed as white. The Court wrote, “In the popular conception he is an alien to the white race and part of the “white man’s burden”…Whatever may be the white man’s burden, the Hindu does not share it, rather he imposes it.”
[Note: The use of the term "Hindu" was used to apply to all people from India. Thind was not Hindu, he was Sikh.]
In Thind’s case, the Court dismissed the use of science as a basis for clarifying race, what they had based their rejection of Ozawa’s citizenship petition on a year before. Rather, they relied on the popular understanding of whiteness and the legacies of US imperialism—one couldn’t be “white” if they were from a race or nation that was part of the “white man’s burden.” [3]
Creation of the "Asiatic" Racial Category
The rulings of Ozawa and Thind contributed to the construction of “Asiatic” or “Asian” as a racial category. Ineligibility for citizenship was applied to Koreans, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesians, and other peoples of Asian countries who represented discrete ethnic groups, even though the cases had only specifically ruled on Japanese and Asian Indians.
In the last paragraph of Thind, the Court referenced the Immigration Act of 1917, arguing that because of the Asiatic Barred Zone, “It is not likely that Congress would be willing to accept as citizens a class of persons whom it rejects as immigrants.” The Court lumped all countries that fell into the Asiatic Barred Zone together into one racial category for the purposes of determining citizenship.
If you're looking for more on how the Thind and Ozawa cases contributed to a definition of whiteness, I highly recommend the podcast "Seeing White" from Scene on Radio, Part 10, "Citizen Thind."
Poll #1:
In Module 11, we learned that after 1870, immigrants who wanted to naturalize had to be either white or Black. Do you believe that if Asian immigrants petitioning for citizenship had claimed to be Black, they would have been more successful than claiming to be white? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Knight Rulings
In Module 11, we examined the 1897 case, In Re Rodríguez. One more case further complicated the understanding of where Mexicans fit into American racial ideology and citizenship. In 1935, Judge John Knight of the US District Court in Buffalo, New York, denied three Mexicans’ petition for naturalization because they had a “strain of Indian blood.”
One of the petitioners, Timoteo Andrade, identified his race as “Spanish,” and his nationality as “Mexican.” His character witnesses, two white men, indicated that his race was “Spanish” and “Mexican.” Andrade told the immigration inspector that he had “Indian blood,” and when asked how much he said, “Maybe I have seventy-five percent; maybe fifty.” Knight denied his application due to this testimony. Andrade later appealed the denial, and stated that he had been wrong when he claimed to have fifty percent Indian blood, in reality it was more like “2 percent.”
In the early twentieth-century, Mexico encouraged Mexicans to adopt a positive national identity centered on the mestizo past, celebrating indigenous heritage. When one of the immigration interviewers pressed Andrade for further clarification, he said, “In Mexico, we hold that Mexicans, even if have not Indian blood, we are proud that we descended from Indians.” The interviewer responded, “That was all right when you were in Mexico, but now [that] you are up here you have no reason to feel that way.”
Judge Knight reversed his ruling, stating, “Men are not white if the strain of the colored blood in them is half or a quarter, or not improbably, even less, the governing test always being that of common understanding.” Thus, Andrade was able to naturalize because he was commonly understood to be “white” or “Spanish” rather than “Indian.” [4]
What made Knight’s ruling even more interesting—and odd—in terms of understanding race and citizenship, was the fact that in 1924, Native people had actually been granted US citizenship.
After World War I, a bill was passed which granted citizenship to Native veterans. In 1924, citizenship was granted to all Native Americans, whether or not they wanted it. As we’ve examined in our module on assimilation policies, citizenship was one of the tactics used to co-opt Native land and resources, and from those who sought to “civilize” Native and destroy tribal culture. Citizenship for Native Americans was not something that was sought after like it was for some immigrants.
Thus, being “Indian” could not preclude someone from accessing American citizenship. However, the way that Andrade’s indigenous heritage was used to deny him naturalization demonstrates how “whiteness” was becoming more and more the prerequisite for full citizenship.
Part II: Laws and Institutions Affecting Immigrants Living in the US
In Part II, we’ll explore some of the laws passed and institutions established during the early twentieth century which affected immigrants’ quality of life. These laws and institutions reflect the context of racial hostility at this time.
Alien Land Laws
In 1913, largely in response to the success that Japanese farmers had in agriculture in the state, California instituted the Alien Land Law, which forbade “aliens ineligible for citizenship” future ownership of land. They were still able to lease land for 3 years, but then they had to move on. The Alien Land Law signified that Japanese labor was still needed in agriculture, but that restrictionists did not want Japanese farmers to settle down and climb the ladder to success in agriculture.
In a significant loophole, children born in the United States could own land, since they were US citizens. To get around the restrictions on owning land, Japanese parents placed land deeds in the names of their children and then acted as “trustee” until children came of age.
The Alien Land Law of 1920 closed the loophole, prohibiting transfer of land from citizens to “aliens ineligible for citizenship” and specifying that non-citizens could not act as guardians for citizens in matters of agricultural land. California’s laws were copied by other states, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Kansas.
The Supreme Court upheld states’ rights to pass such laws in the case Terrace v. Thompson (1923). The Court wrote, “One who is not a citizen and cannot become one lacks an interest in, and the power to effectively work for the welfare of the state, and so lacking, the state may rightfully deny him the right to own or lease land estate within its boundaries. If one incapable of citizenship may lease or own real estate, it is within the realm of possibility that every foot of land within the state may pass to the ownership of non-citizens.” [5]
This quote makes it seem as though Japanese immigrants purposefully positioned themselves against the state and were trying to overtake land, farm by farm. However, as we know, Japanese and other Asian immigrants had attempted to obtain citizenship, and were restricted based on race.
Agribusiness in Support of Mexican Immigration
As noted in Module 11, the 1924 Immigration Act contained no numerical restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. This was largely due to the labor interests and needs of large agriculturalists who had strong voices in government. Agricultural growers argued that although they were racially inferior and unassimilable, Mexican immigrants were essential to agribusiness. They argued that they could “control” the Mexican population and prevent it from infiltrating into American society.
Throughout much of the Southwest, white growers dominated the political, social, and cultural life of border communities. They managed land while Mexicans performed the low-wage and back-breaking work required to grow products. Mexicans were segregated in ways similar African Americans throughout the region.
Agribusiness interests claimed that Mexican immigrants did not desire US citizenship. They claimed that Mexicans were “birds of passage,” and “like a pigeon he goes back to roost.” This simplified viewpoint shows how racial ideology was used to incorporate Mexicans into the US purely for cheap labor. [6]
The US Border Patrol
The Border Patrol was formed in 1924. Agents were instructed to enforce the provisions of the immigration acts, and to prevent unlawful entry of aliens into the United States. By 1924 there were so many categories of people who were prohibited from legal entry into the US, and so many methods of unlawful entry (including unauthorized border crossings, fraudulent documents, breaking the conditions of legal residence) that the Border Patrol’s duties were broadly and vaguely defined and underfunded.
For example, prostitutes were prohibited, so agents could spend their time policing brothels; anarchists were prohibited, so agents could spend their time investigating radical labor organizers or other radical immigrant groups; or it could spend its time policing the borders to catch unauthorized crossers. [7]
For a year after its institution, agents in the Border Patrol were not vested with any sort of police power of authority to arrest anyone in violation of immigration laws. They were essentially just like any other citizen.
In 1925, Congress passed a new law authorizing them to interrogate, detain, or arrest aliens who were attempting to enter the US in violation of the immigration laws, and to search any vessels or vehicles which he believes contain aliens brought to the US illegally.
Overall though, Border Patrol agents were in charge of patrolling thousands of miles of border, with very little instructions on how to do so. Therefore, control over how immigration laws were enforced fell to the officers. The local men of the Border Patrol were in charge of the way that they interpreted and policed immigration restrictions. In the Southwest, simply having “Mexican appearance” was used as a measure for identifying unauthorized border crossers. [8]
Mexicans were not subject to immigration quotas. However, they were still policed on the grounds of “perceived illiteracy,” presumed liability to be a “public charge,” failing to pay immigrant head taxes, violating provisions against contract labor, violating US laws, being suspected of engaging in “seditious” political activities, or being suspected of evading medical inspections.
Poll #2:
In your opinion, which of the following played a more significant role in developing immigration and naturalization policy? Racial discrimination? or labor needs?
Respond in the poll below, or access it here.
Part III: Women in the Progressive Era
During the past few modules, we’ve discussed many aspects of the so-called “Progressive Era.” (Roughly the 1890s through the 1920s.) For example, we explored the role of muckrakers in exposing the corrupt aspects of government, how people lived in the slums, and poor conditions in factories. In this context, where the landscape of the United States seemed to be changing so much (an increase in immigration, the rise of this working class who worked in factories and sweatshops, corruption in government), a certain group of reformers emerged who were obsessed with finding order in this chaos.
In the last part of this module, we’ll examine some of the women reformers who tried to change some of the things they found wrong with American society in the early twentieth century.
Who were the Progressives?
Progressives saw problems in society and wanted to find solutions. They were committed to research, believing that if people did enough research on any social problem, they could find a solution. Thus, they placed great weight on the authority and power of experts.
Progressives wanted to organize and control behavior. An example from Module 8 is “Taylorism,” the practice of scientific management. Taylorites researched how workers conducted certain tasks and broke them down into different components to find the most orderly, efficient way of producing goods. [9]
Most Progressive reformers were middle-class professionals. Many had advanced degrees. They were lawyers, doctors, social workers, educators, and engineers. In this module we’ll focus on reforms targeted at women and children.
Progressive Maternalists
Progressive maternalists focused their reform efforts on women and families in the early twentieth century. They believed:
in a uniquely feminine value system based on care and nurturance
that mothers performed a service to the state by raising citizen-workers
that women were united across class, race, and nation by common capacity for motherhood
that men should earn a family wage to support dependent wives and children at home
Like other Progressives, maternalists had a love of the “expert” and professionalization of tasks. They adhered to an ideology of scientific motherhood. Scientific motherhood emphasized that motherhood was a woman’s chief duty, and that women needed instruction to improve on their domestic responsibilities. They believed that women’s “natural occupation” was motherhood, but that women needed instruction in order to reach their full potential. [10]
Americanization
Maternalists emphasized an Anglo-American understanding of proper motherhood. They wanted to “help” immigrant families adjust to American culture, in order to help them better raise American children. Their faith in “science” and “progress” impacted the view they held of cultural or religious traditions that did not mesh with their worldview. Examples included the food that immigrant mothers fed their families — if it was too “spicy” or too “strong,” Progressive maternalists recommended that they change their diets.
For example, in one of the required readings for Module 12, Americanization Through Homemaking, the pamphlet distributed in public schools in Covina City, California, the author links bad behavior to improper foods:
“The noon lunch of the Mexican child quite often consists of a folded tortilla with no filling. There is no milk or fruit to whet the appetite. Such a lunch is not conducive to learning. The child becomes lazy. His hunger unappeased, he watches for an opportunity to take food from the lunch boxes of more fortunate children. Thus the initial step in a life of thieving is taken.”
This quote reveals that for maternalists,"Americanness" was about more than what one actually ate, but about how the food one ate, and their basic daily behaviors could affect their likelihood of becoming a danger to society, a criminal. (These things could be passed down in families and taught by mothers specifically.)
Some other notes from social workers and reformers after visiting Italian and Jewish immigrant households, early 1920s:
“Still eating spaghetti, not yet Americanized.”
“Strong prejudice against oatmeal and American cheese or oil”
[Jewish] “foods are generally over seasoned, over rich, over sharp, or over concentrated” [11]
Progressive maternalists believed that every woman could be a good mother and raise good citizens, if they assimilated first.
A key part of this assimilation was to conform to a middle-class “nuclear” family model, where the wife would stay home and care for the children as her primary duty, and the husband with find a job outside the home that would be able to provide for the family. This wasn’t exactly a realistic scenario for many low-income immigrant families, who often would have multiple family members (including children) working outside the home in order to make ends meet.
Americanization was not just promoted by women reformers. Henry Ford provided workers at his auto company the opportunity to attend the Ford English School. In addition to English language instruction, teachers would impart lessons about the values of thriftiness, cleanliness, and punctuality—things considered to be essential to the “American” way of living (or at least, functioning well in Ford’s auto plant!).
After graduating from the Ford English School, immigrants went through an elaborate “melting pot” ceremony where they literally walked into a giant pot and came out holding American flags, symbolizing their transformation from immigrant to American. (You can't make this stuff up.)
Progressives placed great importance on the scientific process of learning to become an American and assimilating those into the “melting pot” of American society.
Settlement Houses
Settlement houses were the home base for many Progressive reformers who wanted to encourage Americanization and “uplift” immigrant families. The most well-known was Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in 1889. By 1910, 400 settlements like this existed in major cities.
Located in poor immigrant neighborhoods, settlement house residents provided clubs and social services to the neighborhood. They also served as a kind of “urban social science laboratory,” investigating local conditions and transforming their findings into legislative proposals. It was at settlement houses that many different techniques for Americanization were taught, especially to young immigrant women.
As Jane Addams noted, Progressive reformers believed, “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.”
Many women who got their start in settlement houses went on to occupy higher positions in government and social service. For example, Julia Lathrop lived at Hull House and became the first head of the federal Children’s Bureau, and Florence Kelley became a lobbyist and the leader of the National Consumers’ League. In an era where women’s political power was limited due to the fact that they still were unable to vote, participating in reform movements provided some middle-class white women with a way to hold significant political power and make their voices heard in society.
The reforms they instituted did have major changes and impact on society as a whole. Their achievements cast doubt on the assumption that women’s role in the home would preempt her from also having a role in national politics.
Word Cloud #2:
In your opinion, why might an immigrant woman participate in activities at a settlement house like Hull House? Enter your answer in the word cloud below, or access it here.
Mother's Pensions
Progressive maternalists worked hard to implement reforms at the federal level. One of the most influential reforms they instituted were mother’s pensions, which were available in most states by World War I.
Mother’s pensions provided financial aid to mothers with dependent children who fell outside the male breadwinner/nuclear family model, through no fault of their own.
Therefore, aid was limited to those women who were considered “deserving,” including:
Women with no illegitimate children
Women who did not take in male boarders (this was a common way of making extra income for single women)
Women who were willing to conform to ideal methods of housekeeping and childcare as set by Progressive maternalists
Mother’s pensions were supported by those who believed that mothers should not be separated from children if their husbands died or deserted them, leaving them without a safety net.
Critics believed that mother’s pensions would undermine patriarchal authority in the home, and that it was a form of “charity” or the “dole” which would encourage dependence. However, most of the reformers who supported mother’s pensions did not want to challenge paternal authority, and suggested that the state could be a substitute for the head of the household if the father was unwilling or unable.
However, supporters also believed that motherhood itself was a service that benefited the state, and deserved a salary. These two beliefs conflicted: motherhood should be valued work and compensated, but children should live in families with a male breadwinner. [12]
In actuality, racial components affected who received aid and who did not. Social workers were required to restrict assistance to “suitable” mothers, meaning aid went disproportionately to white, English-speaking widows. [13]
Many states had residency and citizenship requirements, excluding many recent immigrants and domestic migrants from accessing the program.
In addition, the pensions were so low that in many cases, women were forced to find a position in the wage-labor market anyway to support their families, which they had to hide from caseworkers who were suspect of people “cheating” the system.
Mother’s pensions are the beginning of a long and convoluted history of women and the US welfare system. You’ll see these same sentiments surfacing over and over again throughout the twentieth century. We’ll come back to the policies and ideologies when we discuss the New Deal, the 1960s, and the 1990s.
Children's Bureau
The United States Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912, was another key achievement of Progressive maternalists that had a wide impact across the US. The Bureau oversaw programs aimed at improving the health and welfare of the nation’s children. Infant and maternal health was a major concern in the early 1900s. In 1915, approximately 10 percent of all infants (but almost 20 percent of infants of color) died before they were one year old. Approximately six white, or ten nonwhite, women died for every thousand live births between 1900-1930.
Maternalists saw problems with the traditional practices of many women in pregnancy and birth. They encouraged a more medicalized, physician-centered practice for childbirth over midwives. Their assumptions about midwives were rooted in an understanding of many immigrant and poor women as ignorant and engaging in dangerous practices. In reality, poverty and harsh working conditions contributed to the high maternal mortality rate — women worked long hours and were unable to take the best care of themselves during pregnancy, they were susceptible to respiratory and contagious diseases that moved fast through overcrowded housing, they were unable to take extended rest periods after giving birth because they had to return to housework or wage-earning work very soon after, out of necessity. They often had to take their young children with them to work, which was dangerous, but less dangerous than being left unattended. [14]
Scientific childrearing appealed to many women, especially those who were affected by infant and maternal death themselves, who looked to the women of the Children’s Bureau for advice. The first three decades of the twentieth century thus marked a transition between traditional social medicine and the modern medical management of childbirth and childrearing. Women started to turn to physicians more and more, and although they did not fully abandon traditional methods, and still used midwives, they were more likely to combine the two.
Pamphlets produced by the Children’s Bureau became government best-sellers, and provided a wide communication to a large audience through the mail. Many women actually wrote in questions to the Children’s Bureau, and got back responses. The Children’s Bureau coordinated campaigns by local women’s clubs to spread information and awareness through PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) and private charities. [15]
Baby Shows
Baby shows were made popular by Children’s Bureau national campaigns as well as local movements by physicians, churches, women’s clubs, and nurses. Baby shows were conducted at agricultural fairs and exhibitions, and drew a wide audience. They were often advertised and sponsored by women’s magazines in conjunction with the Children’s Bureau.
At baby shows, mothers were able to show their superior abilities in scientific motherhood. Babies were not judged on “beauty,” but rather against a a scientific standard of proper height, weight, and development. They were judged on their disposition, including bashfulness, reluctance to talk to examiners, if they were irritable, or crying.
Babies were judged by physicians. The goal was to encourage child health and welfare, but a mass of data was collected that allowed comparisons between people of different nationalities, people who lived in rural areas vs. city areas, babies who were breastfed vs. bottlefed, etc.
Participation in these shows was voluntary. Many parents entered their children because it was essentially a free physical. “Well-child” checkups that have become so commonplace now were just beginning in the early twentieth century. (Usually, parents would only bring their children to the doctor if they were sick.)
Parents were able to access free health care and pick up information distributed by the Children’s Bureau. Physicians gained experience in conducting physicals. Doctors and the American Medical Association began to sanction these contests.
These contests were also primed to mix with the sentiments of the eugenics movement. Overall, they blended two theories: both that heredity played a role in shaping human development, and that domestic practices (sanitation, sleeping conditions, how babies were fed) made significant differences in a child’s health.
Your reading for this module includes an excerpt from a pamphlet produced by the Office of Indian Affairs and the Children’s Bureau which provides a good example of how reformers encouraged healthy babies, in a way that was racialized. When you are reading this pamphlet, keep in mind how reformers and government agents tried to Americanize and assimilate both Native people and immigrants.
Child Labor
Another tenet of the Children’s Bureau’s platform was to abolish the practice of child labor. This was a controversial issue, especially for families who depended on the wages that their children brought in for family survival. Remember, the Children’s Bureau was staffed by those who believe in the values of Progressive maternalism, and who would rather see a male breadwinner making a “family wage,” enough to support the entire family unit.
Working-class parents who needed their children’s wages, or even considered the workplace to be a safer place for children than gangs or truancy, refused to supply information about their children working, as opposed to the interest they showed in finding out more about scientific childrearing to improve infant health.
Poll #3
In your opinion, was Progressive maternalism empowering for women? (Note: this question is open to your interpretation. In your annotations/comments explain which women you had in mind when answering the poll.)
Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Conclusion:
Whiteness was required in order to access full citizenship in the United States.
American women’s relationship to the state was primarily structured through motherhood.
In a time of demographic change, industrialization, and urbanization, Americans were divided on ideas of morality and supposed “threats” to American culture and society. One way to impose order on chaos wreaked through immigration was to find places for immigrants in American society through assimilation.
Citations:
[1] Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 44.
[2] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 44.
[3] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 45.
[4] Natalia Molina, "In a Race All Their Own: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for US Citizenship," Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 2 (May 2010), 196-197.
[5] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 47.
[6] Molina, "In a Race All Their Own," 171.
[7] Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 46-47.
[8] Hernández, Migra, 48.
[9] Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
[10] Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3-4.
[11] Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State 1917-1942 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 90-91.
[12] Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 31-36.
[13] See Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
[14] Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 74-75.
[15] Molly Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915-1932 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 2-4.
In your opinion, which of the following played a more significant role in developing immigration and naturalization policy?
There have been acts of prejudice in the past that many have forgotten about. For example, the previous JSTOR DAILY article talked about the 1917 immigration act and the current Muslim ban. These had excuses for America to be "safer" and "smarter", but it's obviously based off of prejudice, like most immigration and naturalization policy's.
When it comes to immigration policy, labor needs are high up in the needs of the country. With family's wealth increasing, they increase their education and living standards. Moving away from these low-income labor jobs. The need to replace this workforce increases. As well as these families having fewer children. The displacement and heavy need for labor is detrimental to the economy and the wellbeing of the country. Leading to the need for migration, well also making sure to bend to the norms of society.
The photo of the early Border Patrol agents is interesting to me. Their dress uniforms have not changed much. My husband was a border patrol agent and his dress uniform for graduation was very, very similar to that of the picture. He graduated in 2014 so not long ago. He's now a US Customs agent.
In your opinion, which of the following played a more significant role in developing immigration and naturalization policy? I think it's racial discrimination because this will limit the ability of people in different races can be naturalized into the United States. It plays an important role in changing the norms, perspectives about races.
In your opinion, which of the following played a more significant role in developing immigration and naturalization policy?
I would say Racial discrimination because this issue was still being faced during labor. People were mistreated because of their race, culture.