For eugenicists, cultural and political concerns about the effects of immigration were inseparably linked to biology. In order to prevent the downfall of the American nation, eugenicists claimed that the federal government needed to restrict entrance to the United States and make sure that only superior “races” of immigrants from northern and western Europe gained admittance. In this way, the purity of American genetic stock could not only be protected, but improved. 1

Excerpts from Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 13-14, 17. Used with permission of the author.

“By 1917, the United States had a store of immigration restrictions that were ideologically, if not explicitly, aligned with eugenics goals—a fact not lost on eugenicists. Bemoaning Europe’s alleged use of the United States as ‘dumping ground for its convicts, paupers, and insane,’ [L.E.] Cofer declared that immigration enactments, ‘which purport to exclude some twenty-one classes of mentally, physically, morally, and economically undesirable persons, were originally intended to protect the country from the dumping process described above.’ 2

Congress debated one immigration bill after another between 1875 and 1924. Each one, as Daniel Kelves has noted, widened the circle of inadmissibility. 3 Race and class considerations were ever at the fore. The 1875 Page Law banning Asian prostitutes, real or imagined, virtually halted the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Law was passed as well as the first federal immigration ban on ‘lunatics, idiots, and persons likely to be a public charge.’ The exclusion of Chinese laborers and the insane was upheld in 1891 by yet another law that also singled out ‘persons convicted of crimes of moral turpitude.’ In 1903, the base of unwanteds was again broadened as a new law declared epileptics inadmissible 4. For years later, anarchists, paupers, ‘professional beggars,’ and those with tuberculosis joined the rolls 5. That same year, the Gentleman’s Agreement barred Japanese laborers with the help of the Japanese government, which stopped issuing passports to the would-be emigrants. 1907 also saw the presidential appointment of the Immigration Commission. In its 1910 report to Congress, the commission urged the exclusion of all unskilled laborers arriving without families or wives, limits on the number of immigrants arriving yearly at any port, and an increase in the amount of money an immigrant must have at the port of entry. 6

Then, in February 1917, Congress overrode a presidential veto and passed H.R. 10384, ‘An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence of aliens in, the United States.’ 7 The act revealed as much about America’s feelings toward its native marginalized as it did about the fear of incoming unwanteds. It emerged in the heyday of American eugenics, and should be viewed as part of the political and cultural backlash that accompanied not only the influx of eastern and southern European immigrants (and what remained of Asian immigration after decades of restrictive enactments) but also the large-scale movement of African-Americans to the Northern cities during the Great Migration. It reinscribed the ethnic/racial scapegoating cultivated by eugenic treatises on criminals and the mentally-ill, and dovetailed nicely with half-hearted gestures to labor and to popular anti-anarchist sentiment.

During debate on the 1917 Immigration Act, Senator [Adolph Reed] complained that immigrants were excluded not by race, by ‘character of blood, or even by countries,’ but ‘in accord with parallels of latitude and degrees of longitude.’8 He could take no such issue with the 1924 National Origins Act (aka the Johnson-Reed Act), which set quotas at 2 percent of the 1890 census. The 1924 law owed its success in large measure to the years of anti-immigrant agitation on the part of eugenicists. Their ideological fingerprints were to be seen everywhere on the text of the law. Certainly, the 1924 legislation should be considered the consummate payoff for eugenicists and others who felt that previous bills did not go far enough. It was very much closer to the legislation they had lobbied for even prior to the 1917 act, and thus eugenicist input into the National Origins Act should be viewed as spanning a much longer period than the mere seven years that separated the two laws. 9

See also: Immigration.