Eugenics Case
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US Immigration Policy as Eugenics Strategy
Part One: Across the Oceans
Between 1890 and 1910, 12 million immigrants entered the United States. Efforts before this period attempted to control immigration for economic purposes, which became indirect ways of discriminating against minorities.
Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1902, and federal agreements with the Japanese government restricted the number of immigrants because of the desire to keep labor available to residents already present in the US.
Immigration Restriction Act of 1917 covered European immigrants.
Included ideas regarding “sanitary features,” such as mental problems or disease.
Banned anarchists, polygamists, and anarchists (there was also a concern with those influenced by Karl Marx because of the eventual Russian Revolution of 1917)
Included a literary test
If over sixteen years of age, must speak English, not some other language, including Hebrew and Yiddish
Included the “Asiatic Barred Zone”: extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to include East Asia and Pacific Islanders
Exempted Mexican workers (see below)
Charles Davenport, lead eugenicist in the United States, hired Harry Laughlin to run the Eugenics Record Office (funded by the Carnegie Institute).
Collected statistics on those in prison, asylums, hospitals, and dependent upon the government. Declared that they were mostly immigrants, with most of them being of Jewish descent and non-Nordic.
Wrote sterilization legislation and provided deposition in the Buck v. Bell case confirming the legalization of sterilization of “feeblemindedness.”
January 18, 1923, Washington Representative, Albert Johnson (a colleague of Laughlin in the Eugenics Research Association), invites Laughlin to provide testimony to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Fourteen other Congress members sat on the committee.
His purpose was to provide testimony on the “biological and eugenical aspect of immigration”
“The character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial character.”
American bloodline was in danger from being polluted, especially from the actions of immigrant women: “statistics have shown that immigrant women are more prolific than our American women” and he argued that they had a greater number of “defective children.”
Argued that when two races come into contact, the women of the lower class would