The Making of Modern Immigration: An Introduction | xv since 1910, when the United States Immigration Commission completed its work, the immigrant’s impact on industrial and economic life was studied assiduously, in part to measure national growth, but also to gain insight into the mentality of workers. Getting them integrated was good for business. It was the American way and was the best advertisement for the United States as seen from abroad. It pro- jected the unity of what might be called, after Wallace Stegner’s popular book, a one-nation policy. 5 In 1924, however, with the dawn of serious sociological and methodical re- search, Edith Abbott began to release the first of two large tomes on immigration that shifted the discourse in the Academy toward a more scholarly approach to im- migration. 6 Historians of U.S. politics, at least since the release of George M. Ste- phenson’s A History of Immigration, 1820–1924 , have had no lull in their work to contextualize the rapid pace and complex assembly of legislative actions touching the immigration question, most notably in the area of immigration enforcement. 7 Historical autobiography also began to emerge, such as Jacob Riis’s The Making of an American , also published in 1924. 8 Some of the political challenges of U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward postwar Europe, were marked by isolationism in some quarters, engagement in others. 9 By the 1930s, citizenship education was more formalized, and assimi- lation was the name of the game. 10 This even included moves to improve upon one’s own diction and remove all traces of foreign accents. 11 A concerted effort was made to help educate the new arrivals in the ways of U.S. life. 12 Almost at the same time, however, a move was on to deport those who arrived illegally. 13 People like Merle Curti, a historian at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, became well known for his books and home-study manuals for those who wished to adopt the national history as part of their own identity. 14 By 1944, with World War II on, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) gave some idea of the complexity of immigration by issuing a 1,623-page document (with additional supplements) called Immigration and Nationality Laws and Regulations . 15 The war itself laid waste to the claim that a country could remain neutral on the question of immigration, and so the literature is heavy with a sense of responsi- bility for European refugees—a phenomenon that continued long after the war’s end. 16 Of course, these works were at pains to keep pace with a wide array of monographs on specific ethnic groups and the history of their coming to and set- tling in various parts of the United States. 17 Recent scholars such as Hiroshi Mo- tomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, have given considerable attention to the transformations in the systemic thrust of agencies such as the INS. 18 A nationally recognized expert on immigration and citizenship law, he coauthored the widely used law school casebook, Immigration and Citizen- ship: Process and Policy .
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