Henry Pratt Fairchild, Immigration, and the Legacy of Scientific Racism in the United States by Thomas Ricento

Thomas Ricento’s article critically examines the legacy of Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880–1956), a prominent American sociologist whose work helped legitimize scientific racism and anti-immigration sentiment in the early 20th century.

Read this article and find accompanying references at: https://secularhumanism.org/2025/05/henry-pratt-fairchild-immigration-and-the-legacy-of-scientific-racism-in-the-united-states/

About the Author: Thomas Ricento, PhD, is professor and research chair, emeritus, at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has a BA in political science (Gettysburg College) and PhD in applied linguistics (UCLA). He is the author of Refugees in Canada: On the Loss of Social and Cultural Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) among many other books and articles dealing with language ideologies and the politics of identity. He is currently writing a book on the Americanization movement of the early decades of the twentieth century. He has been a Fulbright Senior Lecturer and a visiting professor at universities in Aruba, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland.

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