ABSTRACT
The Immigration Restric-tion League, founded at Harvard University in 1894, mounted the first organized attempt to pressure Congress to limit immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, and decided requiring a literacy test had the best chance of passing Congress. The Dillingham Commission's two principal recommendations for stemming emigration, the institution of literacy tests and quotas, were not new ideas, but the first recommendation, to limit immigration through a literacy test, was almost a foregone conclusion. Certainly, there were a number of groups singled out as "less desirable", but Italians, and particularly Southern Italians, because of their sheer numbers, seemed to have especially triggered the Nativists' relentless quest to persuade Congress to write quotas into immigration law. Battisti provocatively suggests that Italian Americans most thoroughly “reshaped Italian ethnic identity in the context of Cold War liberalism to claim membership for their group in the American mainstream and then argued for immigration rights on that basis.”.
