Dillingham Commission Report

In 1907 the United States Immigration Commission, called the Dillingham Commission after its chairman, Vermont senator William Dillingham, launched an investigation into patterns of immigration to the United States. The investigation led to the publication in 1911 of the forty-one-volume Dillingham Commission Report.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration was a major issue in the United States. Prior to about 1880, most immigrants were from northern and western European countries such as Great Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. After 1880 or so, many Americans of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock became concerned about the influx of immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern European countries, many of them Jews and Catholics. These immigrants had few labor skills. Most were desperately poor. They adhered to what were viewed as the strange ways of the old country. In the eyes of many Americans, they could never be assimilated into American society. Even if an immigrant came from one of the more traditional countries, the perception was growing that too many of these people were paupers and castoffs. If the immigrant was a single, unemployed woman, it was thought that she would most likely have to either become a ward of the state or support herself through prostitution.

In this climate efforts were made to limit immigration. As early as 1875 the Page Act restricted immigration from Asia, and specifically limited the importation of Chinese laborers to the United States. Section 3 of the act, referred to in the excerpt, stated that “the importation into the United States of women for the purposes of prostitution is hereby forbidden.“ In the decades that followed, the language of Section 3 was changed, until in 1910 it read “that the importation into the United States of any alien for the purpose of prostitution or for any other immoral purpose is hereby forbidden.“

The Dillingham Commission’s report, replete with statistics and tables, would provide justification for later restrictive immigration acts. In 1913 California passed the Alien Land Law, which prohibited “aliens ineligible to citizenship“—principally Asians—from owning property in the state. The Immigration Act of 1917, also called the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, denied entry to immigrants from much of East Asia and the Pacific Islands. The act also established a literacy requirement for immigrants over the age of sixteen and barred “idiots,“ the “feeble-minded“ “epileptics,“ the “insane,“ alcoholics, “professional beggars,“ any “mentally or physically defective“ person, polygamists, and anarchists. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 favored immigration from northern and western European countries by restricting the number of immigrants from any given country each year to 3 percent of the total number of people from that country already living in the United States as of 1910. Congress then passed the Immigration Act of 1924, also commonly known as Johnson-Reed Act and the National Origins Act. A piece of that legislation, known as the National Origins Quota, restricted the total number of immigrants each year to 161,000 and lowered the quota to 2 percent, again greatly favoring the northern and western European nations. Finally, in 1929, the National Origins Quota of the 1924 act reduced the number of immigrants to 150,000. The Asian Exclusion Act, part of the same overall law, barred immigration from Asia entirely.