Stirring the American melting pot: Middle Eastern immigration, the progressives and the legal construction of whiteness, 1880-1924

When an immigrant came to early twentieth-century America, his or her ability to naturalize was dependent on the artificial color designation assigned to his or her group. Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants, however, entered the country as the ultimate "in-between people." They were situated geographically between Europe and Asia and racially between Caucasian and Mongolian, "white" and "yellow." The two groups were unique in that, at the dawn of the Progressive Era, they could have conceivably been placed into either category. This thesis argues that the socioeconomic biases of the people in power at the time, in this case Progressive Era policy-makers, played a large role in determining the "whiteness" of Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants.