DOMESTICATING THE IMMIGRANT: CALIFORNIA'S COMMISSION OF IMMIGRATION AND HOUSING AND THE DOMESTIC IMMIGRATION POLICY MOVEMENT, 1910-1945.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation examines the implementation of a “domestic immigration policy” by California's Commission of Immigration and Housing. The history of U.S. immigration policy is usually written as a fight over restrictions and quotas at the federal level. Describing immigration policy in this way, scholars have ignored the existence of state immigrant protective agencies that emerged during the Progressive Era. By 1923, such policies existed in states having over fifty percent of the United States' immigrant population. California's program was the second in the nation and one of the most ambitious in the scope of its activities.
The first chapter places California's program in the context of a national movement for a “domestic immigration policy.” In California, New York, Massachusetts and other states, this policy aimed to assimilate immigrants through three broad areas of action: protection, education, and geographical dispersion. In practice, these areas of reform translated into state programs for the Americanization of immigrants and the native-born, the state's regulation of living and working conditions, and the state's adjustment of immigrant complaints.
The second chapter introduces the bureaucrats responsible for the commission's development. Chapters three through six examine California's domestic immigration policy in four areas: Americanization, the adjustment of immigrant complaints, the regulation of migrant laborers' living and working conditions, and the regulation of housing. A concluding chapter looks at the movement away from the domestic immigration policy that the commission started with and the development of new policies as part of the “fight against fascism” in California from 1939 through 1942.
This dissertation thus challenges the literature which looks at immigration policy only at the federal level, or which discusses domestic immigration policy merely within a social control framework. When we look at the commission's functions, it becomes evident that the social control of immigrant life was only part of a much more comprehensive domestic immigration policy. Rather than emphasizing Americanization as a one way exchange in which immigrants were expected to adopt American values, California's experience shows that Americanization called for fundamental changes in native-born behavior and institutions to a degree that has rarely been acknowledged in the literature.