Culling the Masses

Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas, co-authored by Associate Professor of Sociology David Cook-Martín, has won several national awards. Cook-Martín wrote the book with David FitzGerald, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

“Grinnell College and its students have played an important role in the development of this book,” Cook-Martín said, citing institutional support and undergraduate research participation funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition, he noted that at least eight students participated through Mentored Advanced Projects, other students served as research assistants, and still others critiqued drafts used in the classroom.

The Book

Culling the Masses explores how governments in the Americas have deliberately chosen their populations by ethnically selective immigration and nationality laws. The book, published by Harvard University Press, challenges the widely held belief that democracies “naturally tend toward welcoming policies of equality and anti-racism.”

“Today, the idea of choosing individuals based on perceived race is repugnant to our ideals of equality and fairness,” Cook-Martín added. “Generations of scholars have argued that racism was an aberration that democracies eventually worked out of their laws.

Culling the Masses challenges this assumption by showing how governments in the Americas have deliberately chosen their populations by ethnically selective immigration and nationality laws. In fact, the governments that were most inclusive, whether democratic or populist, were most likely to select by race. The biggest exemplar of liberal democracy was the United States, which had the longest period of uninterrupted racial exclusions (between 1790 and 1965).”

The Honors

The book has received the following honors:

• The 2015 Best Scholarly Contribution Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section;
• The Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book on International Migration Award from the American Sociological Association; (Cook-Martín’s other book — The Scramble for Citizens — received this same prize in 2014;
• The 2015 Best Book Prize for Books on Migration and Citizenship from the American Political Science Association; and
• Honorable mention for the 2015 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, for best book about U.S. immigration history published in 2014.