The Comparative and Historical Context When W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in 1903 that the problem of the twentieth century would be that of the color line, the United States was in the midst of its rise to become the world’s leading industrial power. More than other ana- lysts, Du Bois recognized that U.S. economic development would expose the social fissures stemming from a rigid black-white fault line and make them increasingly hard to ignore, especially as the country’s growing economic pros- perity spread to a wider swath of whites but not to blacks. In his poignant statement, “The problem of the twentieth-century will be the problem of the color line,” he foresaw that slavery’s contradictions would become ever more conspicuous and that its legacy—painfully apparent in the stain of Jim Crow racial discrimination, rationalizations, and continuing stereotypes put forth to justify resulting inequities—would long continue to plague the country (Berlin 2003; Du Bois 1935). As penetrating as Du Bois’s insights were, he

6 The Diversity Paradox

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failed to account for another—and more often emphasized—defining theme in American history: the opportunity and prosperity promised by immigra- tion and symbolized in nineteenth-century America by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (Handlin 1951/1973). If slavery represented the scar of race on America and the country’s failure, immigration exemplified hope and the prospect of success. Such dreams turned into reality for many of America’s nineteenth-century immigrant settlers, who fueled the expansion of the westward frontier. In this they were aided by the Land Act of 1820 and the Morrill Act of 1858, which provided land and technical assistance for America’s new arrivals, though not for ex-slaves and their descendents (Nevins 1962).

As the western frontier began to close at the end of the nineteenth century (Turner 1893, 1920; Klein 1997), the United States increasingly became an industrial society in the early twentieth century, and it still saw itself in need of newcomers, now to fulfill a growing demand for laborers to work in the burgeoning factories of its mushrooming cities. Immigrants once again provided a solution.