Dillingham Commission

The Dillingham Commission is the U.S. immigration investigation invoked in 168. 银与信：一部日本劳工移民的跨洋汇款史. The episode describes it as a large early-20th-century inquiry whose reports included material on immigrant banks and remittances, interpreting money sent abroad by southern European, eastern European, and Asian migrants as a drain on U.S. wealth.

The commission matters in the source because it makes Racialized Remittance Politics / 种族化汇款政治 concrete. Remittances were not only financial transfers; in U.S. politics they became evidence used to sort desirable and undesirable immigrants, especially amid anti-Japanese agitation and “yellow peril” narratives on the West Coast.

Key Claims

• Official social-science-style immigration investigation can embed racial assumptions in research design and interpretation.
• Cross-border remittances can be reframed from family support into national economic threat when migrants are already racialized.
• Japanese migration after the Russo-Japanese War became entangled with U.S. fear of Japanese imperial expansion.

Connections

• United States — policy and investigation setting.
• Japan and Hawaii / 夏威夷 — migration route and receiving territory context.
• Racialized Remittance Politics / 种族化汇款政治 — concept the commission illustrates.
• Japanese Labor Migration Remittances / 日本劳工移民汇款 — financial behavior interpreted through U.S. immigration politics.