Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy; America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census

by Katherine Benton-Cohen; Joel Perlmann,
The Forward, July 15, 2018

In 1943, Earl Harrison, the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, announced his bureau would remove the designation Hebrew from its “List of Races and Peoples.” Henceforth, the Bureau would classify Hebrews as white and determine group affiliation by the language they spoke and the country in which they resided. Stuart Rice, assistant director in charge of statistic standards in the Bureau of the Budget, thought these revisions might be relevant as well to U.S. census enumerations. Many Jews, however, continued to worry that government officials might use the data they gathered to discriminate against them.