Race, Politics and Immigration
Elizabeth Mendoza
Professor Aubrey W. Bonnett
AS 4250 Immigration Today
Assignment 1 Race, Politics and Immigration Race is essentially a “social construct” and has little relations to biological distinctions among humans. Race was a multicolored pyramid created to put whites on top and blacks on the bottom. It was a device created by Anglo Saxons who felt empowered and race was a tool they molded in order to stay in power. W.I. Thomas stated that; "Race is real because people act as though it is real and thus it has become real in its social consequences." In other words, the simple belief that race exists can come with a cost. In 1916, Madison Grant wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race and in it he stated that; "The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword." Grant was trying to describe the "fear of what the "foreign element" can do to America." The government allowed these humble men and women in to fill the “labor needs of an expanding industrial economy." These immigrants were assigned low paying jobs in horrible working conditions and nobody ever “assumed any responsibility for their well-being (Portes & Rumbaut)."
What has become more important, however, is how physical characteristics and ancestry has been used to define certain groups of people as either "inferior or superior (The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras)." America is a country that has historically always been racialized, a country were race had its roots; starting with the conquest of the Native Americans and followed by slavery or involuntary immigrants. In the 1900s, when many immigrants including new Europeans came to America, law makers and social scientists questioned how these immigrants would fit into the existing racial
Professor Aubrey W. Bonnett
AS 4250 Immigration Today
Assignment 1 Race, Politics and Immigration Race is essentially a “social construct” and has little relations to biological distinctions among humans. Race was a multicolored pyramid created to put whites on top and blacks on the bottom. It was a device created by Anglo Saxons who felt empowered and race was a tool they molded in order to stay in power. W.I. Thomas stated that; "Race is real because people act as though it is real and thus it has become real in its social consequences." In other words, the simple belief that race exists can come with a cost. In 1916, Madison Grant wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race and in it he stated that; "The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword." Grant was trying to describe the "fear of what the "foreign element" can do to America." The government allowed these humble men and women in to fill the “labor needs of an expanding industrial economy." These immigrants were assigned low paying jobs in horrible working conditions and nobody ever “assumed any responsibility for their well-being (Portes & Rumbaut)."
What has become more important, however, is how physical characteristics and ancestry has been used to define certain groups of people as either "inferior or superior (The Social Construction of Race in Two Immigrant Eras)." America is a country that has historically always been racialized, a country were race had its roots; starting with the conquest of the Native Americans and followed by slavery or involuntary immigrants. In the 1900s, when many immigrants including new Europeans came to America, law makers and social scientists questioned how these immigrants would fit into the existing racial