of 1880, European immigration was strongly encouraged as a way of occupying an empty territory, configuring the national population and, through their colonizing effort, gradually incorporating the nation into the world market. These changes were perhaps best summarized by the anthropological metaphor which states that “Argentines descend from ships.” The strength of the immigration and its contribution to the Argentine ethnography is evident by observing that Argentina became the country in the world that received the second highest number of immigrants, with 6.6 million, second only to the United States with 27 million, and ahead of countries such as Canada, Brazil, Australia, etc. The expansion of European immigrant communities and the railways westward into the Pampas and south into Patagonia was met with Malón raids by displaced tribes. This led to the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, which resulted in over 1,300 indigenous dead. Indigenous cultures in Argentina were consequently affected by a process of invisibilization, promoted by the government during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th. The extensive explorations, research and writing by Juan Bautista Ambrosetti and other ethnographers during the 20th century, which followed earlier pioneer studies by anthropologists such as Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, encouraged wider interest in indigenous people in Argentina, and their contributions to the nation's culture were further underscored during the administration of President Juan Perón in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the rustic criollo culture and values exalted by Perón during that era. Discriminatory policies toward these people and other minorities officially ended, moreover, with the August 3, 1988, enactment of the Antidiscrimination Law (Law 23.592) by President Raúl Alfonsín, and were countered further with the establishment of a government bureau, the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism (INADI), in 1995. Corrientes Province, in 2004, became the first in the nation to award an indigenous language (Guaraní) with co-official status, and all 35 native peoples were recognized by both the 2004 Indigenous Peoples Census and by their inclusion as self-descriptive categories in the 2010 census; indigenous communities and Afro-Argentines thus became the only groups accorded any recognition as ethnic categories by the 2010 census. Demographics Indigenous communities today As of the , some 955,032 Argentines (2.38% of the country's population) self-identify as indigenous or first-generation descendants of indigenous peoples. The first government-led effort to produce accurate statistical data on the country's indigenous peoples was the