Eugenicist ideas were “really the start of American immigration law,” says University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton.Mother Jones illustration; Samuel Corum/Pool/CN/ZUMA; Circa/GHI/Universal/Getty
Last Wednesday, the Trump administration “paused” immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, mostly in the Global South, on the supposed grounds that people from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.”
Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children.
As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back. I’ve detailed Trump’s long history of eugenicist claims and policies—which he’s since added to, most recently with his series of explicitly racist tirades about “low IQ” Somali Americans in Minnesota.
I spoke with University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton, the author of Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics, to ask what history can teach us about the role of eugenics in the anti-immigration crusade of Trump and White House figures like Stephen Miller.
You’ve written that immigration policy in the United States has been rooted in the exclusion of people potentially deemed a burden. How so?
Until the 1880s, the US was pretty much open to anybody. There were some state laws in coastal states like New York and Massachusetts that had some inspection, and some laws that excluded what they called “lunatics” and “idiots,” and people likely to become a public charge. But it was just a few states, and it wasn’t really much enforced.
Eugenicists held that “the ‘superior’ parts of any race were set apart—kind of like our billionaires.”
In the 1880s and ’90s, the federal government starts getting involved—they pretty much just followed the state’s examples and excluded what they call idiots and people likely to become public charge. But it was mainly disabled people [who were]likely to become a public charge. That was the main signifier of someone who was likely to be a pauper. Then in the 1890s, and especially after the turn of the century, they started excluding more and more people with disabilities, and being more and more specific about it. The fear was of disabled people who would pass on their disabilities to future generations, something that led you to be inferior.
What role did the eugenics movement play in that change?
Big role. At the time, [when] eugenicists talked about what eugenics meant, they’d say there were two main tracks that it ran on. One was stopping the reproduction of “defective” people through forced sterilization and institutionalization and such. And the other was immigration reform, immigration restriction, to keep people out of the country who were defective. [Eugenicists] had a big influence on policy: they testified before Congress, they pressured their congressional representatives. They generally just made it a public issue. That’s really the start of American immigration law, which is rooted in the eugenics movement. That was the original intent of the laws, was to keep people out who were defective.
Only later in the 1920s did they start focusing on race. When they had to focus on “defective” [people], they implemented policy by inspecting people who came in and weeding out the “bad seeds.” That turned out to be very expensive and ineffective. They couldn’t increase staffing enough to make the inspection effective. [Eugenicists were] also racist, of course, as well—so when they talked about weeding out defective people, they figured that would reduce the numbers of people from “inferior races,” because people from inferior races were more likely to be defective.
So they switched strategy in the ’20s to restrict people by race, by which they meant nationality. Race had a broader meaning at this time: some people talked about the Italian race and the Irish race, and so on. By restricting by race, they [thought they] would also capture most people with disabilities.
[Their thinking was that] defect ran in races and then in particular parts of races: Eugenicists would often be at pains to point out that superior Italians were fine, that the upper classes of Russia were fine, [that] it wasn’t the entire race— it was always that they were just more prone to defect. The “superior” parts of any race were set apart kind of like our billionaires [and] world leaders today—they see themselves as being a special species of some kind. Since people from inferior races were more likely to be “defective.” Disability and “defect” were at the center of immigration law.
The US is suspending immigration visa applications from 75 countries based on the supposed risk that people from those countries are more likely to need public assistance. What are the parallels between that and early immigration laws?
That’s generally [the] justification for the 1920s laws. It was thesame idea that certain countries were more likely to produce immigrants who would need public assistance. But again, the primary concern was that they would spread their genes and pollute the bloodstream of America, which, as you know, Trump used that language too. It was really the blood of America. The “American race” was the issue, more so than the economic impact, but [eugenicists] believed the economic impact over time, over generations, would grow and grow as they spread their “defective genes” more widely in the population.
Is there anything else on the subject that you’d like to add?
Gender and race, and class and ethnicity, are all used as proxies for disability. In the women’s movement in at the turn of 20th century, the suffrage movement, anti-suffragists would be prone to point out women’s defects: women were [supposedly] more likely to be overly emotional, prone to hysteria, and incapable of rational thought. These are all disability, but never thought about that way. The same goes with ethnicity and race. When you want to point out somebody’s inferiority, you point to their disabilities, and that justifies treating them differently. So this is part of a larger pattern of using disability in this way to justify inequalities based on identity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
