175 Lecture 3.10
Eugenics and Immigration:
What we will be investigating this week is the relationship between immigration and eugenics, especially the biopolitical attempts to manage immigration and immigrant populations.
- Biopower/biopolitics
- Eugenics and immigration restriction, pp. 69-90
- Public health and race
Biopower/Biopolitics
Biopolitics is the political management of a population,it is a set of mechanisms that use basic biological features of life as general strategy of power. It is the attempt to control a population by controlling the information about and treatment of biological aspects like life, birth, death, reproduction, illness.
Biopolitics is exemplified by the field of public health.
As you saw from the clip that featured Angel Island, it was thought that diseases were largely carried by immigrants into the United States and that their living conditions spread diseases, and so if you could contain these people, in the case of the plague, by containing all Chinese to Chinatown by a rope, you could contain disease. With advances, the culprits of the plague were discovered to be rats and then the fleas on the rats.
But often in the case of epidemics, the idea that they could be contained by restricting immigration was a powerful one and was instituted into policy and into the major immigration laws.
While eugenics and public health share many tenets, it’s important to think of the distinctions:
Eugenics was a broad idea, promoted by experts and absorbed in the popular sphere. It implemented in a number of different contexts from everyday life—matchmaking, better breeding contests, private decisions about reproduction with regard to birth control to public health and immigration restriction and in the case of Nazi Germany, genocide. It was a broad ideology drawing from racial science, anthropology, psychology, history—all in an attempt to promote good genes. It continues today, what are some examples of this?
In the context of immigration, it was argued that eugenics was an investment in the future of the racial make-up of the country.
Public health practices were largely the domain of experts, and many public health professionals who worked within governmental bureaucracies that were designed to improve the overall health of the population… remember the distinction between the make live and let die rather than the let live and make die. It was a growing field underpinned by the idea that it was important to manage health of the population through sanitation, proper health care, and management of social interaction through space. While it was focused on containing disease, its focus also shifted to attempt to screen for the fitness of future citizens.
Public health officials understood themselves as professionals objectively engaging a problem that needed to be addressed. Although there were certainly those who held eugenic beliefs and their knowledge and information had a powerful impact in shaping policies toward immigrants, I believe that many would not see themselves as racist or wanting to exclude a particular group because of their race.
Public health as a field emerges in the mid-19th century and it emerges to engage these questions of increasing urbanization and the health problems that ensued because of increasing urbanization, especially those issues that related to epidemics. Then, to issues of overcrowding and population, including birth rates and infant mortality.
As we know, this is also the time with increasing rates of immigration, and so much of the work of public health officials focused on immigrants and foreign born and the relationship between disease and race. Furthermore, with the Immigration Law of 1891 stipulating that
"all idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease," and criminals.” Should be barred from entry, public health officials were required at immigration stations.
This law then meant that a more systematic fashion of immigration processing had to take place that included health inspections, and so Ellis Island was built and opened.
Roughly 75 percent of the 21 million who entered between 1885 and 1920 entered through New York Bay and were processed at Ellis Island. About 1% were sent back. Yet, many knew of those who were sent back and were often humiliated and frightened by the process.
Around 1,000,000 immigrants arrived through angel island and some estimates are that over 18% were sent back.
There was clearly, the idea that disability, disease and race correlated to a great extent, and while for some, including the Chinese—they were thought to be unassimilable and therefore incurable, and therefore exclusion was the only appropriate policy, but as Molina has noted, in Los Angeles, Mexicans were thought to be assimilable and public health leaders attempted to work toward educating Mexicans, even translating medical pamphlets into Spanish to attempt to improve health in Mexican communities, but after the Great Depression and the lack of funding, Mexicans were painted as naturally dirty, diseased, and fertile, and therefore would not benefit from policies to improve health. It was also during this time that sterilization practices became widespread in Mexican communities with California in particular having the highest numbers of Sterilization between 1930-1960 with 20,000 sterilizations of the 63,000 sterilizations.
Of course, many of these sterilizations were of those who were mentally disabled or criminals, and race doesn’t explain all of these sterilizations, but the eugenics programs in California were largely supported by public officials, including public health officials.
Insofar as the immigration process was concerned, these public health service officers had a great deal of power. “Every immigrant feared the uniformed U.S. Public Health Service doctor whose every word and action had the potential to instantly change their lives for the better or the worse.”
What Shah and Dwyer do is to get us to think about how eugenics and these ideas of disease was felt by those who endured these practices.
Shah points out that it wasn’t just the U.S. but it was a worldwide network of quarantine and health inspection that served as the “imperial defence” against the potential invasion of epidemic diseases into ports in North America and Europe. just how the process may have felt for those who went through it. Humiliation, fear, anger, helplessness, terror, violation…