Inferiority, degeneracy, and dependency: Problematizing the immigrant in social work discourse, 1882--1952.

摘要

This is a work of discursive history which investigates a particular set of theory-driven questions focused on the representations of immigrants in social work discourse spanning the years 1882 to 1952. The study is founded on a poststructuralist conception of discourse: a contra-modernist, anti-essentialist perspective on language, identity, society, and social practices. Derrida's perspective on language and text provides the theoretical and analytical tools for the deconstructive textual analysis of the social work discourse on immigrants and Foucault's critique of traditional social analysis situates the findings within a broader examination of the constitutive power of a disciplinary discourse.;The study examines three publications: The Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, The Survey, and the Social Service Review, which recorded the public views of the leaders of the emerging field of social work. They represent an "elite" discourse---authorized and sanctioned texts---which not only held significant sway in the constitution of the mode and the course of social work with immigrants, but upheld and facilitated the larger political and civic discourse on immigration and immigrants. The year 1882 saw the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act marking the "beginning" of a period of race-based exclusion, and a general immigration act which expanded the categories of inadmissible aliens begun in 1875, by adding "persons likely to become a public charge." The year 1952 marked the enactment of an immigration act which "eliminated" race as an exclusionary factor but concretized the "National Origins Quota" restrictions introduced in 1924.;Immigrants are problematized in these texts. Whether categorized as the "alien problem," the "foreign problem," the "Americanization problem," the "citizenship problem," the "racial problem," the "refugee problem," the "border problem," or the more specific "Mexican problem," and the "oriental problem," immigrants are conceived as problematic entities whose presence, at best, complicates the smooth operations of the nation-state and, at worst, imperil the physical, material, intellectual, and moral integrity of its society. The cast of characters problematized, the methods of problematization, and the tenor of the voice with which they are problematized change over the years covered; the fact of the problematization does not.