“Little Alien Colonies”: Representations of Immigrants and Their Neighborhoods in Social Work Discourse, 1875–1924

Abstract

The “vexed problem of immigration,” as Jane Addams (1909, 214) termed it, became a central issue for the emerging social work profession. Through a close reading of social work’s public documents in the period from 1875 to 1924, this article analyzes the complex discursive mechanisms by which early social workers made immigrants and their environments legible as objects of intervention and advocacy. In particular, it examines the parallel social and moral calculi employed in social work’s analysis of immigrants and their “little alien colonies” (e.g., Greenleigh 1941, 208). Despite good intentions, social workers often viewed immigrants as dependent, abject, and exotic subjects; at a deeper register than their expressed interest in “the needs and possibilities of the immigrant” (Abbott 1917, 282), social work representations underscored and supported the problematization of immigrants in the public discourse. Contemporary social work faces many of the same dilemmas in fashioning a response to immigration.