Administering Belonging: Immigration Policy and the Construction of American Identity From 1890–1952

This study argues that from 1890 to 1952, American immigration policy functioned as a sustained administrative system for constructing and enforcing national identity. Rather than representing discrete episodes of restriction, humanitarian reform, or wartime adaptation, immigration laws and their bureaucratic implementation institutionalized racial, cultural, and political criteria of belonging that persisted across the Progressive Era, two world wars, and the early Cold War. Drawing upon congressional debates, Supreme Court rulings, executive correspondence, and federal administrative records, this project demonstrates how immigration governance operated as a mechanism of state-building, translating prevailing anxieties about race, radicalism, and national security into durable legal and bureaucratic frameworks. By tracing continuity across periods often treated separately in the historiography, this research challenges interpretations that emphasize rupture or liberalization in the wake of global conflict. Instead, it contends that wartime refugee policies, selective labor programs, and postwar reforms represented constrained adaptations within an enduring identity-producing system. Through sustained analysis of legislative intent, judicial interpretation, and administrative practice, this project contributes to immigration scholarship by repositioning immigration policy not merely as demographic regulation, but instead, as a central instrument in defining the boundaries of American citizenship and belonging during the formative years of the modern state.