About This Case Study

This exercise reads three institutional accounts of U.S. immigration history against one another and treats their divergences as analytical material rather than as inconvenient noise. A scholarly society, a research center, and a national library each maintain a timeline of U.S. immigration. They agree on a great deal — the major statutory landmarks, the broad demographic contours. They diverge in revealing ways: in where they locate the beginning of the story, in which populations they center, in how they handle the contemporary enforcement regime, and in what they leave out.

The premise of the exercise is that the historical record of U.S. immigration is not a neutral chronology to which institutional sources merely supply emphasis but a contested narrative whose periodization, inclusions, and framings are themselves analytical objects. The work positions historians, journalists, and curators as part of the story rather than outside it — and asks you to test what you find against Molina's framework of racial scripts and Simpson's framework of settler colonialism, both of which the unit's readings supply.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Immigration and Ethnic History Society, "Immigration History Timeline" (immigrationhistory.org)
• Pew Research Center, "How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History," September 30, 2015. (pewresearch.org)
• Library of Congress, "Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History" Classroom Materials collection (loc.gov)
• Your notes on Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America, and Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, both from the unit's Key Scholarship
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group

You do not need to be a specialist in U.S. immigration history to do this exercise. The point is not to verify which timeline has the right facts (all three agree on the legislative record) but to see how each tells the story.

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation (10–12 minutes)

Open all three sources. Move through each in turn — about four minutes per source is enough — and note for each:

• Earliest entry. Where does the source begin? With what event, year, or moment?
• Most recent entry. Where does the source end? What contemporary moment does it acknowledge or foreground?
• Audience. Who is the source written for — historians, the general public, K–12 teachers, college students? How can you tell?
• What it foregrounds. What does each source seem to treat as the central thread of U.S. immigration history? Statute? Demographics? The experience of specific groups?

For groups: each member produces their own notes in this phase. Do not share yet.

Phase 2: Building a Comparison Matrix (15–18 minutes)

On paper or in a shared document, build a simple matrix. The three sources are your columns (IEHS, Pew, LOC). Choose four of the following six rows; do not try to fill all six:

1. Periodization. What major eras does each source identify? Where do the period breaks fall, and on what grounds?
2. Statutes foregrounded. Which immigration laws does each source treat as central? Which appear in some sources but not others?
3. Populations centered. Which immigrant groups receive the most extensive treatment? Whose experience drives the narrative of each source?
4. Indigenous peoples. How does each source handle (or fail to handle) the prior presence of Indigenous nations on the territory the United States came to occupy?
5. Enforcement. How is the post-1996 enforcement regime — deportation, detention, ICE, the family-separation policy — represented in each source?
6. Voice and perspective. Whose perspective is the narrative anchored in — the immigrant, the host society, the state, the historian?

The matrix does not need to be elegant. Brief notes in each cell are enough. What you are producing is a comparison instrument, not a finished essay.

For groups: distribute the four chosen rows across members or pairs. Reconvene after about twelve minutes to compare notes and produce a single shared matrix.

Phase 3: Reading the Divergences (10–12 minutes)

Examine your matrix. Where do the three sources diverge most sharply? Where does the divergence reveal something about how each institution understands its mandate?

Ask specifically:

• Which source treats immigration enforcement as a central thread, and which treats it as peripheral? What does this difference suggest about how each understands what immigration is?
• Which source acknowledges Indigenous peoples — and where it does, what does the acknowledgment do? Does it appear at the beginning as historical context, in the body as ongoing, or not at all?
• Where do the sources agree on something contestable? When all three say the same thing about an event, that consensus is itself worth examining.

Choose one divergence — or one shared blind spot — to develop in writing or discussion. What is the institutional position that makes this divergence (or this consensus) intelligible?

For groups: each member presents one divergence in turn (about one minute each). The group then identifies whether the divergences cluster or scatter.

Phase 4: Returning to Molina and Simpson (8–10 minutes)

The unit's Key Scholarship supplies two frameworks that can be brought back to the timelines.

Molina's racial scripts framework holds that the racial categorization of immigrant groups in the United States proceeds not as a series of independent racial projects but through recurring policy templates that are inherited from prior exclusions and adapted to new populations. The script developed against Chinese laborers in 1882 is reactivated against Mexican migrants in the 1920s, against Asian and Middle Eastern populations after 1917 and again after 2001, and so on.

Simpson's framework holds that the very category of "immigration" presupposes a settled national territory whose boundaries appear natural — yet those boundaries were imposed across Indigenous lands. The settler state's immigration apparatus, in this account, depends on a prior erasure of Indigenous sovereignty that mainstream immigration scholarship rarely acknowledges.

With both frameworks in hand, return to your matrix and ask:

• Which of the three sources comes closest to making racial scripts visible — that is, to showing how exclusions developed against one population get reactivated against another? Where does the source fall short of what Molina's framework would name?
• Which of the three sources comes closest to acknowledging the settler-colonial frame Simpson develops? Where do all three sources fall short of what Simpson would name?
• Where, in your reading of the three sources, do Molina and Simpson together reveal something that neither does alone?

For groups: work this phase as a full-group discussion.

Closing Reflection

Complete this thought in two or three sentences:

The three timelines agree on __________ and diverge most sharply on __________. What none of them adequately shows — what Molina and Simpson would name — is __________.

The value of the sentences is in what you choose to include and in what you find yourself unable to fit.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the four phases in order, building the matrix as you go. The matrix and the Phase 4 synthesis are the central artifacts; keep them for reference when answering Question 4 (on Molina and the immigration history case study) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is individual; Phase 2 works best as a collaboratively built shared document with rows distributed across members; Phases 3 and 4 work as full-group discussion. The closing reflection can be a single shared sentence or a list of each member's variation — both are useful.

After the Case Study

• Return to Question 4 in the unit's Questions for Reflection, which asks you to identify a racial script that recurs across two or more eras of U.S. immigration history. The matrix supplies the material for this answer.
• To extend the exercise: the Zinn Education Project's collection of teaching materials on immigration (zinnedproject.org) is curated from a different pedagogical and political framework than the three institutional sources and provides a useful counter-source for comparison. Adding a fourth column to your matrix — what the Zinn collection foregrounds that the others omit — sharpens what is at stake in each source's framing.
• For a deeper account of how "illegal alienage" was produced as a racialized legal category in the early twentieth century, Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (Princeton, 2014; updated edition) is the foundational treatment. Reading Ngai alongside the three timelines lets you test which sources accurately register the centrality of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and which underplay it.