In the Progressive Era, the standard of living became a social scientific and policy-relevant bureaucratic measurement. As historians have shown, the ostensibly objective statistical metric of consumption challenged a “market-driven conception of wages or income” and rested on normative assumptions about the ideal standard, family roles, and labor relations.1 It was also embedded in a discourse on who could attain it and how. A migrant-knowledge approach to the development of standard of living measurements explores how American social scientists drew these normative contours in relation to their experience and understanding of what they termed the immigration problem, the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who sought to live and work in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s. Migrant knowledge encompasses knowledge both by and about immigrants, drawing attention to immigrant actors who cross state borders, bring cultural baggage along with material belongings, and often maintain ties to their places of origin. This concept assumes that immigrants do not have particular knowledge by virtue of being immigrants; rather, it asks how immigration-related experiences, discourses, and institutions shape modes of knowing and communicating that knowledge. It takes knowledge as embodied practice, influenced by material conditions as well as its own materiality.2 This approach frames the debate on immigration and the standard of living as a mutual engagement of both immigrants and native-born Americans, made tangible through their knowledge practices.

Concerns are rising over far-right support among security forces, given their role in upholding the state’s monopoly on violence. Such support raises fears that far-right ideologies could shape law enforcement practices and undermine democratic norms. Existing explanations often attribute this alignment to authoritarian and law-and-order preferences. Using data from the European Social Survey, this research note examines whether security forces are more likely than the general electorate to vote for far-right parties and identifies the attitudinal drivers of such support. The analysis finds no systematic evidence that security forces vote for far-right parties at higher rates than the broader population. Moreover, immigration attitudes—not law-and-order preferences—emerge as the strongest predictor of far-right voting across both groups. These findings challenge the common view that security forces are uniquely drawn to the far right for authoritarian reasons and underscore the central role of immigration politics in shaping far-right support more broadly.

Scholars of the politics of consumption in the United States have argued that the early twentieth century marked the emergence of a new kind of “economic” or “consumer citizenship” which linked Americans’ political identity with their ability to access and afford mass-produced goods.1 A fuller examination of the participation of immigrants in these economistic visions of citizenship remains to be established. The years surrounding World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Max Ehrenfreund has recently suggested, constituted a critical moment when consumption and citizenship became more tightly linked not only through the choice to consume but also to refrain from consumption.2 In this piece, I explore “financial citizenship,” a term I used to describe an alternative form of civic belonging linking affinities for markets and politics.3 Financial citizenship—namely, the public outcry for a more responsive economic system that could provide cash for everyday transactions, efficient access to credit, and a variety of financial instruments for other purposes—was a vision raised by a broad range of demographic groups, from northeastern ironworkers to midwestern farmers to Black wage workers in the urban New South.4

The promise of a full stomach drew many emigrants to the United States. Defending an American standard of living—one that included steak dinners—was also an argument marshaled in favor of immigration restriction. By the turn of the twentieth century, food in the United States had become abundant enough for people to no longer strive for a full belly only. About half of the population was still involved in agriculture, but with a clear trend of fewer people necessary to produce more food.1 Consumers emerged as an important political factor. Government policies and agencies concerned with consumer protection and food production mushroomed, with the Food and Drug Administration forming in 1906. Some of these agencies had opposite goals. For instance, David Fairchild headed the Office of Plant and Seed Introduction (founded 1898), scouring the world for food crops to enrich American agriculture and palates. Meanwhile, at about the same time, the Bureau of Entomology, tasked with the study of insects, became concerned about the introduction of foreign pests, leading to the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912.2

Today’s “democratic ideal,” claimed Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman, was nothing more and nothing less than the “socialization of luxury,” the opportunity for everyone to find pleasure and contentment in the world around them. In early twentieth-century America, an era of growing material abundance, democratic life required that “leisure and culture will no longer be the possessions of the favored few” but be available to everyone in the course of daily life. Seligman’s insistence that democracy was as much in the streets as in the voting booth was far from novel, as he surely knew. Seligman lived in New York City, where working-class men and women made the same point every day. They laid claim to the new abundance of American life, an abundance they helped create, each time they put on fancy hats, went to Coney Island, strolled through Central Park, listened to opera, or laughed at vaudeville. Seligman translated their actions into economic prose and made a theoretical, as well as practical, argument for pleasurable consumption as a basis for modern democratic life.1

This article discusses how the state’s failure to respond to the needs of a marginalized community leads to a sense of being undeserving among its members, a sense that significantly shapes their legal consciousness. Focusing on Chinese immigrants’ reluctance to discuss contracts openly and invoke the law to seek redress in Canada, this article challenges the approach of blaming culture for some immigrants’ different perceptions of and relationships with the law in the host country. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this study argues that the host country’s devaluation and non-recognition of foreign credentials, its lack of intervention in predatory practices targeting vulnerable immigrants, and its failure to provide adequate legal resources accessible to immigrants with diverse language and cultural backgrounds, all work in tandem to push Chinese immigrants away from contracts and keep them from turning to law for help in Canada. Drawing on vulnerability theory and legal consciousness scholarship, it develops a multi-level legal consciousness framework to connect micro-level experiences with macro-level forces to understand how individuals who share the same marginalized identities participate in reproducing structural inequalities within their own communities due to state inaction.

In February 1920, Los Angeles County Health Officer J. L. Pomeroy commented on the habits and practices of Asian immigrants:

Contributions to this forum underscore the fact that mass migration during the Progressive Era coincided with the emergence of mass consumption. Progressive Era immigration studies are at the core of the emergent knowledge economy of the age of abundance, centered on an American standard of living that was associated with high wages, affordable goods, more leisure time, and opportunities for material and cultural self-realization. The taxonomies created during the transition to consumer capitalism frequently pathologized immigrants. In their classifications, many Progressive Era protagonists associated immigrants with a low standard of living that manifested itself in unhygienic lifestyles, unhealthy nutrition, and inappropriate consumption. In this reading, categories such as race and ethnicity are part of the construction of the figure of the consumer and the politics of consumption; they reflect modern consumerist subjectivities and structures.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

This paper considers how issue salience environments affect long-term patterns of political choice via processes of political socialization. Drawing on the well-known ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis, we theorize that voters who grew up in high-immigration salience contexts subsequently exhibit higher levels of voter-party agreement on immigration (issue congruence). We find support for this hypothesis from two studies, which leverage cross-sectional variation within cohorts in exposure to immigration salience in voters’ formative years. The first employs congruence data from a survey of 10 European countries, linked to historical salience data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The second is a within-country study, measuring salience and congruence from two long-running German public opinion survey series. The analysis suggests that growing up at times when immigration is high on the political agenda can have long-term consequences for the relationship between voters’ preferences on that issue and their political choices, shedding light on the mechanism behind ‘generational realignment’.