Consider in this light the upper reaches of the workforce. During the 20th century, white Americans monopolized the highest-paying jobs. In 2000, nearly 85 percent of the baby-boom workers occupying the top quarter of occupations (ranked by annual salary) were white.

But, since the beginning of the new century—and as a consequence in part of the demographic decline in the numbers of young whites entering the labor market—the young adults starting these jobs have increasingly been non-white or Hispanic. (These figures are derived from the Census, so I use the Census term “Hispanic” in that context.) Now, one-third of the new job entrants are minorities. That means not just more persons of color with good incomes, but fewer whites in positions of authority—to decide who gets hired or promoted.

But there’s a catch. The minority individuals benefitting from upper-level opportunity are predominantly from recent immigrant backgrounds—they are mainly Asian Americans, both immigrant and native-born, and U.S.-born Latinos. But the share of Black Americans in these good jobs has budged just slightly over time and hovers around 5 percent.

A similar disparity appears in the surging diversity at colleges and universities, which is likewise dominated by immigrant-origin minorities. The 2019 report of the American Council on Education highlights a steep rise in the number of Latino graduates—including a doubling of the annual number earning baccalaureates in 2004-14 alone. Correspondingly, the share of whites among graduates dropped from 73 to 64 percent in the same period. At elite universities, the white share of students has fallen sharply over several decades.

But for Black Americans, the decades of the new century have not brought such good news. Their college graduation rates grew strongly during the second half of the 20th century but have slumped recently. That same ACE report notes that Black students have relatively high rates of dropout from baccalaureate programs, and have the highest level of student indebtedness. At a time of rapidly growing diversity among college students, the stagnating fortunes of Black students are an unacknowledged crisis.

These patterns resonate with U.S. history. During the quarter century following World War II—a period of momentous ethnic change, when mass assimilation ushered previously marginalized eastern European Jews and Irish and Italian Catholics into what had been an Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream—immigrant-origin groups leapfrogged over African Americans.

On a smaller scale, a similar assimilation seems to be happening today.

American society continues to operate in two registers for minority Americans, as it has done historically. The registers, taking the term in its musical sense, refer to the notes, or signals, that people, especially young people, perceive in their everyday environments and in contacts with institutions such as schools and the police.

In one register, bright notes outweigh dissonant ones and encourage many youth to strive for the mainstream. In that register, ethnic and racial distinctions diminish in importance; and there’s a chorus of voices proclaiming that we live in a meritocracy where young can be whomever they want to be. In the other register, the notes are more uniformly somber. The tune here is that only the most exceptional will escape the severe disadvantages of their minority status; everyone else need not try.

The common view holds that this disparity among non-white minorities is connected with skin color. But in reality, it has more to do with the different ways that groups have arrived, either through immigration or through conquest and enslavement. Embedded in the nation’s historical psyche are preferences for immigrants as individuals who have chosen America to improve their lives. But also embedded are prejudices against the descendants of enslaved and colonized peoples—because of the continuing influence of moral justifications used by whites during slavery and conquest. Some immigrants and their children also feel this prejudice, especially those with very dark skin, and those who have been denied legal status despite long residence.

The increasing inclusion of minorities in mainstream settings is now reaching into, and altering, American families. A widely noted trend of recent decades has been the steady increase in intermarriage: Since the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, the percentage of intermarriages among newlyweds has risen from 3 percent to 17 percent, or one out of every six marriages. The great majority of them unite a white partner with a minority one.

The mixing in families is the most revelatory indicator of the quiet ethno-racial reshaping of the societal mainstream. It is impacting America’s child population in ways that have profound long-run implications. According to my analysis of birth certificates, almost 15 percent of the babies born in 2018 had parents from different ethnic or racial groups, and 11 percent—or one of every nine—had a white parent and a minority one. The most common combination by far involves whites partnering with Hispanics.

The obvious question is where children from multiple backgrounds fit in a still racially divided American society. This question holds particular import for those children with white and minority parentage.

The evidence about mixed minority-white Americans that we have to date, though far from complete, is broadly consistent. It includes census data, large-scale surveys (especially by Pew), and in-depth interview studies. The bulk of these (mainly) young people appear to be participating in diverse social worlds. They have grown up with whites and count whites among their close childhood and adult friends; they have high rates of marriage to whites as well, which is perhaps most telling. In addition, their educational attainment is greater, on average, than would be the case if it was determined mainly by their minority origin.

The self-identities of this growing cohort of mixed minority-white Americans are unusually fluid, but typically incorporate their white ancestry. As the sociologist Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl describes Asian-whites in her insightful study, they feel “white enough,” but not exclusively white.

Americans with mixed Black and white parentage are the hugely important exception. By and large, they grow up in less affluent circumstances and are exposed to more severe individual and institutional discrimination (evidenced by, among many other things, their frequent complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the police). They are more comfortable with Blacks than with whites and usually identify with the Black sides of their family heritage. Yet, despite the racism that impacts their lives, they too exhibit a level of integration with whites that exceeds that of other African Americans: they are as likely to marry whites as to marry Blacks.

The mainstream in many parts of the U.S. is tilting away from exclusive whiteness. The naming of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential candidate is one more indicator of this tilt. But Harris’s background cuts another way, too, and is a reminder of the dual registers of our society. In this century, both major-party nominees of color for national office—the California senator, and President Obama—had an immigrant parent and came from racially mixed families, reminding us of the selectivity of the processes diversifying the mainstream.

As these inclusive processes advance, they may call into question the harshness of racism. But as long as American society continues to operate in the second register, where the individual and institutional processes of racism stifle Black Americans and some other minorities, the country will not succeed in overcoming racism.

The post Who’s Left Out of the New American Mainstream? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The hoops seen outside most homes and gathering places on western reservations speak to basketball’s cultural significance for Native peoples. For them, the sport is more than a pastime. It has become a modern expression of indigenous identity and pride, and a glue that bonds families and tribes more tightly together.

It might seem peculiar that a sport invented by Dr. James Naismith, a white man, has become so dear to Native people, especially since their ancestors first encountered it during hard times, in hard places. Native youths began learning basketball just prior to the turn of the 20th century while confined to government and missionary-operated boarding schools—or “Indian schools” as they were known. These institutions aimed to erase Native identities, and left many youths traumatized. Yet from these schools sprung a renewed athletic zeal that helped invigorate Native communities in times of struggle. The story of how this occurred speaks to both Native resiliency and the redemptive power of this sport.

Basketball’s association with the boarding schools’ assimilationist mission was more than incidental. In accordance with federal Indian policy, non-Natives in charge of these places used basketball, and other mainstream sports like football and baseball, as tools to mold Native boys and girls into model pupils, and model Americans. The idea was that playing exhilarating, well-ordered sports against white opponents would boost student morale, instill discipline, and improve race relations.

Native athletes largely rejected this agenda. They instead claimed possession of the sport to serve their own purposes. Ever-determined and adaptable, young Natives perceived structural parallels between basketball and their ancestral sports, and so played this new game to connect to the old ways and score victories amidst the injustices of the white man’s world. At the same time, the sport also allowed for escape. For youngsters who had been wrested from their homes and confined within institutional walls, basketball became a mental and physical refuge, allowing them to temporarily leave behind daily drudgeries, relieve stress, and bond with teammates.

Students could relate positively to basketball, despite its institutional attachments, because they exercised a surprising degree of control over their experiences with it during the early 1900s. Although authoritarian environments in most respects, the boarding schools were uncharacteristically lax in supervising athletics, due to understaffing. Outside of structured physical education classes, Native athletes self-managed most of their interactions with basketball. They formed and coached their own intramural squads, organized pickup games, and practiced shooting during precious moments of free time. Even in varsity contexts, Native captains directed on-court play, often under the supervision of Native coaches who were themselves graduates of these schools.

Students tasted similar freedoms playing other Indian school sports, but in fewer numbers. Compared to all-male football, which was the schools’ leading spectator sport, basketball’s availability to girls, as well as boys of small stature, made it a more democratic game. Its playability in tight spaces, minimal equipment demands, and easily learned rules further boosted its appeal, making it the most widely played Indian school sport by the 1920s, at both the intramural and varsity levels.

Basketball’s rise to popularity in the Indian schools was an underdog success story. Most administrators regarded the game as a minor diversion—especially compared to football, baseball, and track—when it debuted at their institutions. The supervising U.S. Indian Office only loosely promoted the sport, and local superintendents only occasionally introduced it. More often, lower-level employees and contract staff, many of whom had learned basketball through the YMCA (the sport’s parent organization), brought the sport to Native kids.

Despite humble beginnings, basketball caught on like wildfire amongst students within weeks after its introduction to various Indian schools during the mid-1890s and early 1900s. One hoops hot spot was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, the second-largest Indian school after Carlisle, in Pennsylvania. By 1900, even before the school had purchased its first basketballs, students were shooting old footballs and clumped balls of rags at makeshift hoops all over campus.

We know this from their enthusiastic letters to relatives back home. “Basket ball is all we know now,” reported one female student. “In the girl’s building we play in the halls sometimes, with a bucket for a goal.” There was “not much to think about in what extra time we have except basket ball,” wrote one of the boys. In his letter, he included a written rundown of the rules so his parents could try it themselves.

Gymnasiums at Haskell and other Indian schools soon filled with boys and girls trying out for prized positions on newly organized varsity teams. Those talented enough to make these squads earned the pleasure of escaping campus for days or weeks at a time to compete on the road and see the country. The most athletically talented boys relied on basketball to stay out during lulls between football and baseball seasons, while it was the sole sport affording girls such opportunities.

Hawk Street in Starr School, Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Courtesy of Tony Webster/flickr.

Indian school athletes so embraced basketball, and intensively played it, that they developed their own stylistic approach by the early 1900s. In contrast to the plodding, controlled game many non-Natives employed, Indian school teams typically played an agile, fast-paced, high endurance, and long-shooting version that dazzled spectators and flummoxed opponents. As culturally diverse as these students were, most were from tribal communities that had long emphasized distance running as a life necessity—and as a spiritual bridge to immortal creators who had run their own races before the dawn of time. Prior to entering the schools, many tribal athletes had also played indigenous field sports like lacrosse that privileged agility, toughness, and speed.

While confined together, these youths developed an uncanny synergy that allowed them to channel these shared traditions into a new format. They did the same with football to a degree, as exemplified by Carlisle’s famously quick and nimble gridiron teams of the era, but basketball’s freer flowing design made it particularly conducive to stylistic innovation. It afforded the interpretive space they required to fully express the old ways through the new.

Indian school teams refined this swift, free-wheeling style so effectively that even the sport’s inventor took note. During James Naismith’s years coaching at the University of Kansas between 1898 and 1907, he frequently observed male players in action at neighboring Haskell Institute. “I made it a point to see several games at Haskell,” he later wrote, “because I delight in the agility of the Indian boys.” He was struck by how fast and effortlessly these athletes moved their bodies and the ball about the court, a style that matched his idealized vision of the game. Naismith did not comment on girls’ teams at the Indian schools, but sports reporters noted that they too were fleet of foot. Among them was a team of Yuchi girls in Oklahoma that outpaced its opponents while playing in moccasins. They were the only Indian school team in the country to opt for this footwear, no doubt because it increased their speed advantage over opponents who, in that era, commonly played in heeled leather shoes.

This high energy play made champions of some early Indian school teams. Haskell’s young men triumphed first, in 1902, when they snatched a national amateur title away from a team representing a fraternal order in Independence, Missouri. Soon thereafter, some Indian school girls’ teams captured state championships against high school and college opponents. Albuquerque Indian School took New Mexico’s territorial crown in 1902. The next year, Chemawa won in Oregon, and Fort Shaw triumphed in Montana. In 1904, Fort Shaw’s team earned even greater distinction while playing match games at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Led by sharp-shooting center Nettie Werth and forward Emma Sansaver, who was said to dodge “here and there with the rapidity of a streak of lightning,” they beat all comers and were dubbed world champions by some reporters.

News of what these teams accomplished instilled pride in tribal communities, thus spreading basketball’s appeal beyond the Indian schools. But regardless of whether they returned home as champions, thousands of former Indian schoolers all did their parts to disseminate the sport. By the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds were returning to the reservations each year committed to stay in the game and teach it to their tribespeople. They were soon joined by former schoolmates who had kept playing basketball in other formats prior to returning home. A handful beat long odds to play college ball, while hundreds more played in Army training camps during World War I, again relying on basketball to nourish their spirits during difficult times.

Dozens more made a go as professional barnstormers, capitalizing on the hoops skills they developed in the Indian schools to tour the country and earn a modest living. Notable among them was the world’s greatest athlete, Jim Thorpe. Although best known for his achievements in football, baseball, and track, he had also played basketball in the boarding schools. He returned to the game late in his professional sports career by captaining the so-named World Famous Indians from 1926 to 1928. Like other Native barnstormers, Thorpe and his teammates stayed true to the Indian school playing style, employing a fast “driving attack” that wore their opponents ragged, and drew enthusiastic crowds throughout the Midwest.

Sadly, public memories faded over time of what the Indian school teams and alumni had done to inspire tribal communities, and to inject added life into the sport of basketball. By the late 20th century, the Indian boarding schools had largely been supplanted by public high schools as the focal points for hoops ins Native communities. Only a handful of people remembered how the Native athletes at places like Haskell and Fort Shaw had claimed this sport for their people. But the legacy of those Indian school players nevertheless lived on—in the joys basketball kept bringing new generations of lightning-quick Native hoopsters and their adoring fans.

The post How Native Americans Made Basketball Their Own appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Francesco Capra was born in 1897 in Bisaquino, near Palermo, Sicily, the youngest of seven children. (“Capra” means goat in Italian; the town’s name is derived from the Arabic “rich in waters.”) In 1903—at the height of Italian emigration—the family booked passage for America. Millions of Italians from the Mezzogiorno (the south) emigrated just one generation after the unification of Italy in 1861. The mass migration was seen as an indictment against the way that unification was carried out as well as the increasingly desperate plight of the laboring poor in Italy.

Conditions in steerage on the steamship Germania were miserable, an experience Capra never forgot. As he explained to film historian Joseph McBride:

You’re all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot. Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There’s no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They’re all miserable. It’s the most degrading place you could ever be.

But as the ship passed through New York Harbor, Capra’s father admonished his son, age 6, in what could have been a scene from one of his later movies: “Ciccio, look! Look at that! That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! That’s the light of freedom! Remember that!”

It seems Capra internalized that idealistic message during his life and advanced it in his films. Capra was never one to wax nostalgic about his Italian ethnicity. Indeed, he often insisted that he was American, without any hyphen and without deep ties to Italy. That ferocious desire to become American, and erase what may have been (for Capra) an embarrassing past, came to fruition in his film work. Even with relatively positive images of Italian-Americans, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra absorbed ambivalent stereotypes about Italian migrants from his adopted country, and conveyed them in his films.

As the film opens, we catch a glimpse of Martini’s, the restaurant and bar belonging to Giuseppe Martini, played by the actor William Edmunds, whose stage name was an erasure of Michele Pellegrino, born in Basilicata, Italy in 1886 and arrived in New York City in 1897. As film scholar Giuliana Muscio notes in her new magisterial study Napoli/New York/Hollywood: Film Between Italy and the United States, many Italian actors in Hollywood anglicized their names in order to secure work. Ironically, they rarely played Italians on screen and were often cast as other ethnics. Conversely, Italian characters were often portrayed by non-Italian actors.

Immigration scholars have long debated whether immigrant Italians were denied the privileges of whiteness or were considered “white on arrival.” Beyond dispute is the fact that Italians were not welcomed by earlier immigrants such as the Irish.

The pressure to assimilate was ferocious. Social workers made the rounds of Italian communities urging parents to send their children to school (where their names were often changed) and to eat oatmeal rather than Italian food for breakfast. During World War II, government posters admonished Italians in America not to “speak the enemy’s language!” even as Capra was making the film series Why We Fight for U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall. As late as the 1950s, Mario Cuomo was urged to change his name after graduating top of his class in law school, unable to land a position at a white-shoe law firm.

The saga of the Martini family in the film partially reflects this historical reality. Giuseppe Martini is the classical, striving immigrant, desperately yearning to advance the material prospects of his family. With a loan from the Bailey Savings & Loan Company, he secures a coveted home in Bailey Park, thus acquiring a part of the American Dream. As the family prepares for the move out of the Potter slum, Mr. Martini triumphantly announces to a neighbor that he will no longer rent but be the proud owner of his own home.

George and Mary Bailey are on hand to assist with the move. George packs the numerous Martini children into his car—with the requisite goat—and off they go, with Martini singing that universal marker of Italianess, “O Sole Mio.” Martini’s accent, gestures, and prodigious brood (human and animal), are all signifiers of Capra’s internalized image of how Italian-Americans were seen through the lens of American popular culture. On the steps of their new home, Mary Bailey presents Mrs. Martini with bread “that this house may never know hunger” and salt “that life may always have flavor.” Then George presents Mr. Martini with wine “that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini castle!” as Mr. Martini makes the sign of the cross.

Later in the film, George Bailey is drowning his sorrows at Martini’s bar as “Voglio cantare una canzone d’amore” plays on the jukebox. Martini asks, “Why you drinka so mucha my friend?” When Bailey is assaulted by a boorish patron, Mr. Martini is swift in throwing out the offending man for breaking the code of friendship, insisting “He no come ina my place no more!” (Martini, like many immigrants, is marked by—among other things, such as the goat—his broken English.)

All this was part of a larger history. An earlier migration of Italians from northern Italy, including Filippo Mazzei (friend of Thomas Jefferson) and Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist and first professor of Italian at Columbia University), had convinced political and immigration authorities that the later-arriving southern Italians were of lesser status.

Northern Italians were descendants of Dante, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. But Neapolitans and Sicilians, who comprised a majority of migrants between 1880 and 1924, were considered barbarians, racially and intellectually inferior. Around 1900, as Italians were disembarking at Ellis Island and New Orleans by the millions, they were required to check off “Southern Italian” rather than “White” on entry forms and were portrayed in popular culture as rats carrying disease, licentiousness, and radical political ideas. Italian anarchists loomed in the imagination of Americans much as Islamic terrorists do today. If, during the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti (1920-27), one would postulate that there would eventually be not one but two Italian-Americans on the Supreme Court, it would be as if today someone suggested a Muslim for the same position.

That bigotry is present in the film. When George Bailey, in desperation after his business partner Uncle Billy loses an $8,000 deposit, begs Mr. Potter for a loan, the evil banker sneers at the idealist Bailey for being a “nursemaid to a bunch of garlic-eaters,” a not-so-subtle dig at Martini and all Italian-Americans. They had been called worse: dagoes, guineas, wops. Italian-Americans had been despised as gangsters and mobsters, and found hanging at the ends of ropes, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for having the audacity to befriend African Americans, and posing a libidinal threat to the purity of virginal white American women, the dark side of the Latin lover stereotype.

As the townspeople arrive at the Bailey home with baskets of cash to bail out the Savings and Loan, Mr. Martini enters shouting, “I even busted the juke-a-box!” That jukebox, as Mark Rotella notes, would have included songs by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como and—later—many other Italian-American singers such as Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. Mary Bailey calls out to Mr. Martini, “How about some wine?” again, another marker of Italianess.

Capra’s depiction of the Martini family was simplistic and already out of date by the time of the film’s release in 1946. An extraordinary shift in America’s image of Italian-Americans took place during the middle third of the twentieth century. Public figures such as New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees, and crooner Frank Sinatra (whose short film The House I Live In, espousing racial, religious and ethnic tolerance, won an Academy Award), were at the forefront in shaping new perceptions. In 1950, all three candidates for New York mayor were Italian-American. (Two were actually Italian-born). It also helped that Italian-Americans had been the largest ethnic minority serving in the armed forces during World War II.

Italian-Americans began leaving their ethnic conclaves across the country and moving to the suburbs. (See the ending of Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, published in 1965). By 1946, the move to the suburbs was accompanied by a move rightward on the political spectrum among Italian-Americans. Why the political evolution? Perhaps it was anger at the Roosevelt Administration’s decision after Italy declared war on the U.S. to label 600,000 Italians who had never become American citizens as “enemy aliens” and intern several thousand in camps (before they were released on Columbus Day 1942 in anticipation of the presidential election). Perhaps it was an awareness that to fully be admitted to American society and enjoy its privileges, Italian-Americans had to embrace some of the darker aspects of American prejudice.

Italian-Americans felt they had proved their loyalty to America by renouncing Fascism (which many had supported in the 1920s and 1930s), and raising their children as “good Americans” only speaking English. Capra was emblematic of this evolution in real life, but the change isn’t reflected in this film—or any of his other films.

It seems both Capra and American popular culture preferred their Italians caught in amber, genial and warm-hearted but not too cerebral, or complicated.

The post Frank Capra Oversimplified the Italian-American Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Dillingham Commission is today little known. But a century ago, it stood at the center of a transformation in immigration policy, exemplifying Americans’ simultaneous feelings of fascination and fear toward the millions of migrants who have made the United States their home.

In 1911, the Dillingham Commission produced perhaps the most extensive investigation of immigration in the history of the country, an exhaustive 41-volume study that demonstrated just how vital 19th-century and early-20th-century immigrants were to the U.S. economy. But the commission’s own recommendations, delivered in the context of a fierce backlash against migrants, set the foundation for the end of industrial-era immigration and a half-century of exclusionist policies.

Congress created the Commission in 1907 in an effort to find a compromise between proponents and opponents of immigration. During the previous several decades, pundits and lawmakers had debated the need to impose restrictions on immigration. Lawmakers enacted several polices intended to interdict those deemed to pose a specific danger, such as people afflicted with contagious diseases or involved in moral turpitude. One notable act excluded Chinese laborers, and another prohibited the entry of workers who had been hired overseas by U.S. companies.

But critics dismissed these provisions as insufficient, and instead sought laws to reduce the overall number of entrants and improve their quality, the latter of which meant attributes, like literacy, that were perceived to make it easier for newcomers to assimilate and contribute to the nation.

The literacy test, a requirement that most adult immigrants be able to read or write, became the preferred restriction. Supporters saw it as the best means of securing the “most desirable” migrants, while critics saw education as the product of opportunity, not character or potential. In 1907, when Congress could not agree on its propriety, it created the Dillingham Commission—named for its chairman, U.S. Sen. William P. Dillingham, a Vermont Republican.

Over the next three years, the nine-member commission—comprising three U.S. senators, three representatives, and three “experts” selected by President Theodore Roosevelt—fulfilled its charge by conducting a thorough and wide-ranging investigation of current and past immigration. Its multi-volume Reports is a treasure trove of information that remains profoundly useful to students of immigration today.

The Dillingham Commission, named for Sen. William Paul Dillingham, front row, middle. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Most of the work centered on “Immigrants in Industry,” but other topics of inquiry included “Immigrants in Cities,” “Children of Immigrants in Schools,” and a study of changes in immigrant physiology, the last conducted by anthropologist Franz Boas. He and his associates took head, or cranium, measurements of immigrant children in schools and concluded that the U.S. environment was engendering positive changes in “bodily form.” The children had features less like their European counterparts and more like “American types.” Commissioner Jeremiah Jenks also prepared a controversial Dictionary of Races, in which he sought definitively to identify and characterize the world’s races—or ethnic groups.

But it was not these reports that made the most impact. The commission also produced a compendium to summarize its findings and make policy recommendations. The latter would have profound effects.

The commissioners based their recommendations on the principle of admitting immigrants of such “quantity and quality as not to make too difficult the process of assimilation.” This, they acknowledged, constituted a departure from America’s traditional welcome of “the oppressed of other lands.” A corollary called for basing admission standards on “the prosperity and economic well-being of our people.” This raised the question of which polices would produce the desired effect. The recommended literacy test, argued racial theorist Madison Grant, would exclude low-quality individuals lacking in social, physical, and mental capabilities and who added nothing of value to America’s moral or intellectual character. Others saw it excluding too many of the hard-working manual laborers who had forged America’s steel and built its railroads.

After intense debate, the commission recommended passage of the literacy test, calling it “the single most feasible” method of exclusion. Restrictionists viewed this as an endorsement of their cause and used the recommendation to secure the test’s eventual passage by Congress in 1917.

The Reports also mentioned several other possible means of restriction that could warrant future consideration. These included the “limitation of the number of each race arriving each year to a certain percentage of that race arriving during a given period of years.” At the time, “race” was often equated to the modern meaning of ethnicity and sometimes drew its terminology from nationality, such as references to the “German race.” But, Jews were considered a distinctive race, subsumed within various nation-states.

William W. Husband, the Commission’s chief administrator, thereafter developed a quota scheme based on the 1910 census. Admission of immigrants belonging to a particular nationality would be limited to 5 percent of their total as reported in the census. Congress reduced that percentage to 3 in its temporary quota measure, passed in 1921. The permanent measure, passed in 1924, lowered it to 2 percent and used the 1890 census as the benchmark. The changes were deliberately designed to exclude more southern and eastern Europeans, so-called new immigrants deemed “undesirable” by many contemporary Americans. Asians, deemed wholly “undesirable,” did not receive any quotas. (Intriguingly, the Quota Acts exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.) These provisions would define American immigration policy until passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

The experience and impact of the Dillingham Commission offers lasting lessons to a country that still argues about immigration. The chief one is that fear tends to override facts about immigration policy, even when facts are in abundance.

Throughout its inquiry, the commission’s investigators sought to maintain objectivity; to collect the facts, let them speak for themselves, and make recommendations absent of bias. Throughout the Reports, the commission described immigrants positively, including the vilified “new” arrivals. Even the verbiage immediately preceding the recommendation of the literacy test spoke of them positively.

Yet, a social climate of fear and bigotry hijacked the investigation, and the commissioners themselves, ignoring facts in their own reports, endorsed restriction, largely to exclude the most recent types of immigrants. Critics, to no avail, would argue that socioeconomic conditions did not warrant more extensive exclusion, based on the commission’s own standards for such action. But the commission’s identification of the literacy test as the most “feasible method” trumped any such assertions.

So, too, when William Husband drafted his initial quota proposal, he based it on much more generous terms than did the congressmen who approved the final version. He also included quotas that would admit people from Asian countries—but the final versions in the quota laws had none, as bigoted extremism carried the day. The United States would enforce an Asian Exclusion Zone until the 1950s, and then establish only minuscule Asian quotas.

The post The 41-Volume Government Report That Turned Immigration Into a Problem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The security concerns are understandable, but largely misplaced. Unlike what has been happening in Europe, people seeking to become refugees in the United States undergo intensive screening over a prolonged period, a process that lasts between 18 and 24 months. All potential refugees are first processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and then have to pass a series of background clearances from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that include in-person interviews and exhaustive foreign and domestic database checks.

It’s bad enough that many Americans don’t understand how difficult it is to be admitted as a refugee to this country. But they also don’t understand how hard it is for these refugees, often arriving from horrendous circumstances, to make the rapid adjustment American society expects of them.

We have spent years studying what it takes for refugees to make the transition from initial desperation to that point where they are independent, well-established, contributing members of society, which is what we all want. We draw primarily on our experience in Arizona, a prime home for refugee resettlement. Since 2001, nearly 23,000 refugees—mostly from Iraq, Somalia, Burma, Bhutan, and the Congo—have come to the Grand Canyon State.

It’s hard to overstate how lost most refugees are when they arrive, and how tough it is for them to find their footing and move forward. Many times when they are first picked up at the Phoenix or Tucson airports, they don’t understand where they are; they only know they that they are somewhere near California. We’ve learned that there are strategies that work—and those that don’t.

Once in Arizona, refugees receive an initial boost, no more than $1,125, to cover an apartment, food, and basic necessities. But that one-time financial assistance runs out quickly, usually within three months. They also receive a basic cultural orientation as well as supportive services from sponsoring local organizations to help them adjust to living in completely new environments. These services can be accessed by refugees only during their first five years in the U.S., but are often limited to extreme health needs and primarily employment.

The idea is for refugees, with a combination of public and private help, to swiftly become self-sufficient and independent by integrating into society (and the workforce) as soon as possible. This approach is different from many European models which can be more financially generous, but create greater dependency and difficulties in acculturating.

But our process also leaves many refugees worrying about how to find their way and get ahead. Those early days can be heartbreaking. Many come with such high expectations, and quickly discover how much they don’t know, how challenging the weeks and months ahead will be. Take the case of a Somali family that only knew a rural agricultural lifestyle before being resettled into urban Phoenix: They were quickly shown their new apartment, then left to their own devices. Social workers returned another day to discover that the family had been huddling in the dark, unsure how to flip on the lights, turn on the fridge, or operate the stove.

It can be bewildering to need to relearn how to carry out the basics of everyday life, not to mention (in many cases) a new language. Where do you shop? How do you get there? Why does the food appear so different from what you are used to? How do you prepare this unfamiliar food in the markets? Why is toothpaste and deodorant necessary here, rather than the traditional methods of personal hygiene that you have used for a lifetime back home? What kind of toothpaste do you buy if you have never bought any before? How is it possible that a neighborhood in America, the golden land, actually seems dangerous?

A caseworker or a local family may answer many of these questions and even take the refugee family on a preliminary field trip. But then the time comes to ride a bus on their own, and they may get terribly lost. Why? In one case, a refugee relied on the landmark of a Circle K market with a mountain in the background, only to discover later that there are quite a few mountains and Circle Ks that ring the area.

Some refugees are college graduates; others can barely read. Whatever their family background, they know that school is that critical starting point, and desperately want their kids to have access to an American education. We know how education can help new families—many ASU alumni and current students pursuing careers in social work, social justice, and human rights came to the U.S. as refugees in their childhood.

The push for a job can offer the promise of a new beginning, the chance to survive economically and integrate with the larger society. This is especially meaningful if the honeymoon period of optimism and relief after landing in the U.S. is coming to an end. This can be when feelings of boredom, isolation, nostalgia for the home country and old problems reemerge and make it hard for them to move forward. This is also when post-traumatic stress symptoms can sprout.

We’ve seen many male Iraqi refugees struggle with these symptoms. With their generally open and forceful manner, they often have been quick to land jobs. But months later, many complain of bad headaches, stomachaches, extreme fatigue, or other physical problems, sometimes causing their employers or coworkers to think they are lazy and pretending. But when they’ve gotten care, professionals diagnose a delayed form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. It can be even worse for Bhutanese refugees—many of whom have experienced extreme trauma and end up taking their own lives.

The pressure to transition quickly from need to self-sufficiency carries other risks as well. Refugees are often encouraged to take low-wage, low-skilled jobs that are available right away. They get a momentary benefit, but those jobs rarely set them up for success.

It’s a paradox that refugees arriving with college degrees or other advanced education can have the hardest transitions. They often resist work that is below their standard, even if they lack the language skills or necessary certifications to pursue the same work here that they did back home. That’s understandable, but it can lead to them suffering longer periods of isolation and struggle.

To overcome these challenges, we’ve developed a social entrepreneurship program that boosts the potential of these newcomers to become greater contributors to their local communities and the broader American economy. Our program provides entrepreneurs from various refugee communities with training, and connects them to resources such as consultants, micro-lenders and start-up incubators for starting their own ventures. Through new social ventures like New American Community, Inc., their identities are transformed from dependent refugees into new Arizonans with gifts to offer their new homes and neighbors. This is one path towards raising self-esteem, economic security, and social embeddedness.

One Congolese woman, recently resettled to Arizona, worked with her local community leaders who had participated in our social entrepreneurship program. She was able to realize her dream of starting a business in America when she opened a dress-making and tailoring shop in Phoenix that sells African-style clothing to both African women in the U.S. and also to the general population interested in African fashion. This entrepreneurial engagement offers a key antidote to a common source of refugee malaise—the feeling that they have few or no choices. It’s dispiriting when everything is done for you and everyone else makes decisions about what should happen to you.

In the weeks and months ahead, politicians in the U.S. and other nations will continue to grapple with the best way to manage the ongoing refugee crisis. We know from experience that resettlement can be effective and enriching to our society. We can only hope that our political leaders draw on our country’s long knowledge and rich experience with refugees, rather than give in to momentary doubts and fears.

The post For Refugees in America, Even the Light Switches Can Be Bewildering appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.