Reviewed by:

• America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census by Joel Perlmann
• Libby Garland (bio)

In this lengthy study, Joel Perlmann reconstructs the bureaucratic decision-making, social scientific debates, and political wrangling that produced the categories into which the federal government has sorted immigrants—and the populace generally—according to "origins." He traces how those diverse "origins" have been understood, variously, as "race," "people," "nationality," and "ethnicity." These categories were constantly re-forged during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The granular history underlying this process of category-creation, Perlmann hopes, "may help dispel illusions about the nature and authority of the classifications and about the limits of their utility, while still leaving us"—both social scientists and, in the post-civil rights era, those fighting for racial justice—"able to appreciate and profit from that utility" (398).

Perlmann explores questions that matter to historians of migration and race. In particular, he addresses an issue central to debates over whiteness in the United States: the relationship between "two different kind of race difference," meaning the differences among European newcomers, on the one hand, and, on the other, "between Europeans and others—that is, between whites and nonwhites" (6). It was not so much that Europeans became white, he suggests, as that intra-European racial differences ultimately became less salient. Perlmann also attends to the outsized role Jews played, both as objects of classification and as participants, in the debates over state efforts to define ethno-racial categories.

Part I describes the complicated career of the "List of Races and Peoples." This classification scheme was introduced by New York-based immigration officials hoping to sort and track the increasingly broad array [End Page 650] of newcomers arriving in the late nineteenth century. The List was especially geared toward differentiating among European immigrants from multiethnic empires, who officials felt were getting jumbled together in government data. A few years later, the newly minted US Immigration Commission used the List as the basis for its multivolume report, and, shortly thereafter, proposed that the Census Bureau adopt the List as the framework for a new question on race. All the parties who engaged with the List grappled with conceptual confusion, but Jewish activists were particularly vocal critics, protesting the label of "Hebrew" in official data. Their objections threw a wrench in the government's data-gathering work, pushing officials to justify their schema and derailing the proposal to include the new "race" question on the 1910 census. Instead, the census continued to use "race" to signify differences along white/nonwhite lines, differentiating European peoples only by "mother tongue."

Part II examines the "National Origins" immigration law of 1924. Perlmann argues that this law, which drastically reduced the migration of eastern and southern Europeans, represents an important instance of racial distinctions among whites having significant discriminatory impact. This was so even as the law also enshrined an even greater divide between whites and nonwhites, most forcefully in its commitment to near-total Asian exclusion. Perlmann also explores the immigration legislation in the context of other policy debates around racial differences, including Supreme Court decisions declaring Asians racially ineligible to naturalization and the move to reclassify Mexicans as racially distinct in the 1930 census.

Part III explores the gradual embrace of the concept of "ethnicity" in the latter half of the twentieth century, both in social scientists' work and in government policy. Perlmann notes that "ethnicity" continued to reflect confusion around the significance of "origins." The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, for example, stipulated that visa applicants must state their "ethnic classification." This provision flummoxed government officials charged with implementing the law, however, and lengthy debates ensued. Meanwhile, Jewish lawmakers and advocates objected to categorizing "Jewish" as an ethnic classification, as their counterparts earlier had to including "Hebrew" as a category.

Part IV discusses shifting meanings of "race" and "ethnicity" during the civil rights era and beyond. Perlmann describes the increasing significance of official ethno-racial classification practices to the quest for racial justice, as federal data on race and...

审核人：

• 美国对移民进行分类：从埃利斯岛到2020年人口普查，乔尔·佩尔曼（Joel Perlmann）
• 利比·加兰（生物）

在这项冗长的研究中，乔尔·佩尔曼（Joel Perlmann）重建了官僚主义的决策，社会科学辩论和政治争端，从而产生了联邦政府根据“起源”将移民分类的类别，以及一般民众的分类。他追溯了如何将这些多样化的“起源”理解为“种族”，“人民”，“国籍”和“民族”。这些类别在二十世纪和二十一世纪初一直在不断地被伪造。Perlmann希望，这种类别创建过程的细致历史可以“消除关于分类的性质和权威以及其效用的局限的幻觉，同时仍然让我们离开”社会科学家和后世民权时代

佩尔曼探讨了与移民和种族历史学家有关的问题。特别是，他谈到了美国关于白人问题辩论的中心问题：“两种不同种族差异”之间的关系，一方面是欧洲新移民之间的差异，另一方面是“欧洲人之间的差异”。以及其他（即介于白人和非白人之间”）（6个）。他认为，欧洲人变白并不是什么大事，因为欧洲内部的种族差异最终变得不那么明显。佩尔曼还参与了犹太人在国家努力界定种族-种族类别的辩论中扮演的过大角色，无论是作为分类的对象还是参与者。

第一部分描述“种族和人民清单”的复杂职业。这种分类方案是由纽约移民官员引入的，他们希望对越来越广泛的分类进行分类和追踪[End Page 650]19世纪末到达的新移民。该清单特别适合于区分欧洲移民与多种族帝国，官员们认为政府数据中的这些移民混杂在一起。几年后，新成立的美国移民委员会以这份名单作为其多份报告的基础，并在此后不久，提议人口普查局将这份名单作为种族问题的新框架。与《清单》有关的所有各方都在概念上陷入困惑，但犹太激进主义者尤其是直言不讳的批评家，他们在官方数据中抗议“希伯来语”的标签。他们的反对使政府的数据收集工作陷入僵局，迫使官员们为他们的计划辩护，并破坏了包括新“种族”在内的提议。关于1910年人口普查的问题。相反，人口普查继续使用“种族”来表示白人/非白人之间的差异，仅通过“母语”来区分欧洲人民。

第二部分考察了1924年的“民族起源”移民法。Perlmann认为，该法律极大地减少了东欧和南欧人的移民，这是白人之间种族差异具有显着歧视性影响的重要实例。即使在法律还规定白人与非白人之间更大的鸿沟时，情况也是如此，这是在其对几乎完全排除亚洲人的承诺中做出的最有力的努力。佩尔曼还在围绕种族差异的其他政策辩论的背景下探讨了移民立法，其中包括最高法院宣布亚洲人不适合入籍的决定，以及在1930年人口普查中将墨西哥人重新归类为种族的举动。

第三部分探讨了社会科学家的工作和政府政策在二十世纪后半叶对“族裔”概念的逐渐接受。佩尔曼指出，“种族”继续反映出对“起源”意义的困惑。例如，1952年的《麦卡伦沃尔特法案》规定，签证申请人必须声明其“种族分类”。但是，这项规定使负责执行该法律的政府官员感到困惑，随之而来的是漫长的辩论。同时，犹太立法者和提倡者反对将“犹太人”归为种族分类，因为他们的同僚此前不得不将“希伯来语”归为一类。

第四部分讨论了民权时代及其后“种族”和“民族”的转移含义。佩尔曼（Perlmann）描述了官方的种族-种族分类实践对于寻求种族正义的日益重要的意义，因为有关种族和种族的联邦数据...