'The charged status of race in the census did not end there. Contemporary arguments about racial ‘degeneration’ and the changing composition of the US population fed directly into the census of 1920, in which almost half the form was devoted to questions about where people were born and what their parents’ mother tongue was.'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/john-lanchester/get-a-rabbit