Social Science Research Council

In 2000 the International Migration Program established a working group to explore the relationship between immigration, race, and ethnicity in the United States in historical-comparative perspective. The project narrowed its focus to the last great wave of immigration that transformed American society from 1890-1920 and the contemporary, post-1965 period. The massive immigration of recent decades continues to reshape racial-ethnic identities and relations in the US in dramatic ways. With this in mind, the working group compared these developments with the past in an attempt to put contemporary issues in a new light and to specify and revise current theoretical formulations about the relations between immigration, race, and ethnicity.

The project organized two workshops for which participants prepared papers for general discussion. Thematically linked papers were grouped into those addressing general perspectives, pan-ethnicity, socio-economic profiles and trends, and intergroup comparisons and relations. Among the issues that were examined was the nature and composition of the ethno-racial hierarchies that existed then and now and how they have evolved over time. The different processes of identity formation were compared in order to examine how and with what consequences the racial and ethnic identities of various groups formed and transformed. Comparisons were also drawn to look at the relationships between immigrant communities and existing or indigenous racial minorities then and now.

The Russell Sage Foundation has agreed to publish the working group papers in a volume entitled Not Just Black and White (for more information click on the program link above). The publication will be the first to examine racial and ethnic groups in the United States as interrelated history, hopefully encouraging an interrelated approach to the future study of immigration, race and ethnicity.