Theories of race-making have recognized the confusion and contradiction in state-led racial projects but have not sufficiently elaborated their unintended consequences. Focusing on the relationship between the state, racial science, and immigration policy in the early twentieth century United States, this article illustrates how practical challenges in racial projects can jeopardize and thereby eventually trigger innovations in modes of racial governance. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) was a Congressional investigative commission that attempted to collect comprehensive data on immigrants in order to (...) provide a scientific foundation of immigration policy. Specifically, the most powerful members of the Commission’s executive committee wanted to single out Southern and Eastern Europeans (SEEs) and portray them as “undesirable races.” Developing such a classification scheme, however, proved to be difficult, and the facts collected from the field did not support their goal, instead demonstrating that in many cases SEEs were not very different from other immigrants and their native-born counterparts. The idea for national quotas, as well as the theoretical foundation for the inclusion of SEEs, emerged in this process, not as an outcome of ideological design but as an unintended byproduct of knowledge production. I highlight the pursuit of facts-based governance and relative autonomy of middle-level managers as key factors that enabled such process. (shrink)

How can ethnic boundaries survive in contexts of legal racial equality and institutionalized ethnic mixing? Constructivist theories of ethnicity have long emphasized the fluidity, rather than the durability, of ethnic boundaries. But the fact that ethnic boundaries often endure—and even thrive—in putatively non-ethnic political contexts suggests the need for sustained attention to the problem of boundary persistence. Based on an ethnographic study of ethnic boundaries in the Turkish case, this article argues that the regulation of the domain of sexuality and (...) marriage can play a critical role in reproducing boundaries when political institutions neither acknowledge nor aid in the survival of ethnic diversity. Ultimately, the data provide substantial evidence that the transmission and internalization of informal rules of inter-ethnic sexual conduct are central to boundary maintenance. (shrink)

Theorizing of forced migration and refugees has been paralyzed by excessive reliance on migration theory. This article suggests the need to transfer conceptualizations of forced migration to sociological theories of violence. To that end, a preliminary step is argued to be indispensable: the affirmation of the force factor as a vital concept for meaningful theorization of refugee phenomena. Conceptual and empirical reasons are offered to resurrect the force factor’s centrality. First, I suggest the need to resolve the conceptual residuality of (...) “forced migration” in sociological theory, proposing manageable terminology for the task at hand. Second, I sketch conceptual and empirical reasons that the force factor is a viable and urgent candidate for our theoretical toolkit. Finally, I assess in depth the shortcomings of three prominent relativization conditions: (1) unwitting severity; (2) processual dilution; and (3) political-economic indeterminacy. By overcoming onerous relativization habits, we open horizons for coercion-centric theoretical insights on forced migration. (shrink)