For 15 years, sociologist and immigrant Sunmin Kim has both studied and experienced a dramatic shift in American immigration discourse—from the pro-multiculturalism of the Obama era to the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration.
Kim, an assistant professor of sociology who came to the United States from South Korea to pursue his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, considers his first book, The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate, an attempt to make sense of this transformation.
“How did Americans come to think of immigration, and how does this structure not just everyday conversations about race and immigration, but also about national identity?” Kim asks.
To find answers, he examined the first major wave of immigration in the early 20th century. The influx of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe and Asia sparked intense debate, widespread backlash, and government-sponsored studies that restrictionists hoped would prove immigrants were harmful to the nation.
But the facts told a different story. The data underscored immigrants’ value, forcing opponents to shift their arguments entirely—not abandoning prejudice, but reconfiguring it around new targets and frameworks. Kim argues that this foundational mismatch between evidence and prejudice created a new way of thinking about immigration that still shapes policy today and contains the seeds of our current crisis.
In this Q&A, Kim discusses these “unruly” historical facts and tackles a pressing question: If positive data about immigrants hasn’t changed minds, what will?
The title of your book is The Unruly Facts of Race. Why are the facts unruly?
Current scholarship revolves around whether U.S. policy toward immigration has been racist or not. Some scholars argue it was racist; others argue it wasn’t. Current scholarship is a blend of the two—clearly racist in some cases, but not entirely racist in others. I call this a mix of racial essentialism and racial liberalism. I’m centering on the facts and arguing that this mix emerged not because Americans learned better or changed their attitudes, but because of unexpected findings from empirical inquiry.
How do you define these terms “racial essentialism” and “racial liberalism” in the book?
Racial essentialism, or racism as we conventionally understand it, is a 19th-century way of thinking. It’s full of prejudice but posits itself as scientific truth about the world, arguing that superiority or inferiority is a fact in nature and society. Racial essentialists claimed that when we study the world as it is, we’ll see a natural hierarchy of people that puts the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man on top and others on the bottom. They did this with help from the American state; they got funding and personnel and unleashed massive data collection efforts across the United States, hoping to find data showing immigrants to be inferior to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, whom they perceived to be the core of the nation.
But what they found wasn’t what they imagined. They got a different reality where immigrants weren’t that different from “Western” or “traditional” Americans. Their whole argument denouncing immigrants and controlling immigration didn’t sit on factual foundations. So they had to shift their racial essentialism.
What became more important was not the difference between western and northern Europeans and southern and eastern Europeans—which was a main battle line in the United States for immigration—but rather the white/non-white distinction. Suddenly Asian immigrants became a very important crux of racial distinction in immigration discourse.
I think that’s the essence of where racial liberalism emerges—that mismatch between prejudice and facts, and the subsequent reconfiguration of racial ideology. Racial liberalism is a way of thinking that people who are different from us are only temporarily different. They’re different for now, and they can become more like us with sufficient help or intervention. So it’s a way of thinking about the “other” that tries to neutralize or domesticate them by making them more like us. In that sense, it’s racial paternalism: “Their lifestyle is not like ours, but they can benefit from being more like us. So we’re going to help them be more like us.” This undergirds the general American worldview; there’s a clear distinction between who we are and who they are, and we can do something about them.
My point is that racial liberalism is limited by this foundation—it relies so heavily on racial essentialism. When we think racial liberalism is the only answer to racial essentialism, we’re very much limited by what happened in the early 20th century.
You saw echoes of anti-immigrant language from the early 20th century in Donald Trump’s rhetoric from 2016. Do you think the nation is circling back to these stances from the 1900s?
We’re not going back, but rather we’re witnessing the end of an era. What I call racial liberalism is a product of the early 20th century, at the intersection of social science and pro-immigrant advocacy, and this changing perception of race. It had its benefits and limitations, but its limitations are pushing us in the direction we’re seeing today. Yes, some of what we see today has existed before—these aren’t strangers to American immigration history. But at the same time, where we’re going is uncertain because we’re at the end of this 100-year cycle.
I want to hold racial liberalism accountable—the optimistic rhetoric—because when you look at the details, it’s dicey to characterize it as pro-immigration. It contains much discussion about multiculturalism and being “a nation of immigrants,” but at the same time, deportation was ramping up. The Obama administration wanted to take this dual track of reforming the immigration system and enforcing the border simultaneously. That represents the crux of racial liberalism: Immigrants are welcomed as long as they abide by certain conditions. Once you can prove yourself to be good material for becoming American—loyal, patriotic, and law-abiding—you’re welcome. But if not, you’re not welcome. And then something must be done to you.
The current enforcement operation is an extreme example, but it does not deviate too far away from the framework set by racial liberalism, at least ostensibly. I’m trying to make this somewhat radical argument that racial liberalism is what got us here.
You say you urge readers to say goodbye to what we had in the 20th and early 21st centuries and imagine a new future with respect to immigration perception and policy. What does that future look like to you?
Scholars for the last half century have been focusing on delivering facts that render immigrants in a good light—data showing that immigrants work hard, abide by the law, don’t commit crimes, and have families. But what I’m seeing is that no amount of positive facts dispels this anti-immigrant sentiment. People who have decided not to like immigrants simply will not like them.
Many social scientists studying the information environment ask: Why don’t people respond to the right kind of information? Why are people attracted to misinformation? I argue we have to ask a different question: Why do we suppose people will embrace the right kind of information? For people who are cut off from the higher education system, the distinction between right information and wrong information is meaningless. I think we should embrace that meaninglessness, and that should be the starting point of 21st-century social science. I'm not saying we, the experts, are the people they should listen to—but that we need to understand the different foundations people are starting from.
I have no evidence, but I have a hunch that telling people immigrants are “vulnerable and fallible, just like everyone else,” may help neutralize some of the negative sentiment. After all, people hate being lectured. When we say, “Immigrants are great people; they’re practically like saints, much better than you,” the people on the receiving end feel threatened. But if you tell them, “Immigrants look different, and they do different things, and they eat different food, but like you, they make mistakes, and they’re as vulnerable and as complicated as you are”—that message might resonate.
We have nothing to lose. It’s not going to hurt us because there’s no further down we can go in terms of the tragic situation around immigration right now. None of what we’ve done shielded us from what we are now witnessing. We may as well try something new. I think this is the moment for risk taking and radicalism in immigration advocacy.