In the work of Cornell and Harmann (1998), they highlight how often these racial categories have changed, allowing new groups to move in and out of each classification with the only fixed truth being that being classified as white was better than being classified as non-white (p. 26). Before 1965, a year that introduced new immigration policies, the United States sought to limit the majority of its immigrant population to having Northern or Western European ancestry. Immigrants from other countries were seen as non-white and therefore undesirable. This was the case for many immigrants such as the Irish, Southern Europeans, and Jews (Omi and Winant, 1994, p. 17) and led to laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (“Race: The Power of an Illusion – Episode 1” , 2003). In their article, Barrett and Roediger highlight the terms that academics have used for these immigrants as “our temporary Negroes. . . [and] ethnic groups that are not yet white” (1994, p. 404). These phrases represent the ideas of assimilation that often begin to emerge when examining the immigrant experience in the United States. During this time period, Gordon's classical assimilation theory dominated how people thought immigrants would assimilate. Their classification as “non-white” would only be temporary, since to do so