Immigration: Law and Policy

One of the driving forces behind early U.S. federal immigration law, beginning with the first major legislation, the Immigration Act of 1882, was the exclusion of “defective” people (as well as those considered criminal or immoral, problems seen at the time as resulting from “mental defect”). Federal legislation throughout this period repeatedly, and with everincreasing urgency, identified defective immigrants as a threat to the nation. In 1907, the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration declared that “the exclusion from this country of the morally, mentally, and physically deficient is the principal object to be accomplished by the immigration laws” (U.S. Bureau of Immigration 1907:62). When immigration quotas based on nationality were enacted in 1924, a rhetoric of “inferior races,” based on claims that people of certain nationalities are prone to be physically and mentally defective, was instrumental in creating the image of the “undesirable immigrant.”

The desire to keep disabled immigrants out of the United States was not an isolated development; rather, it was one aspect of an era that saw the segregation of disabled people into institutions, the sterilization of the “unfit” under state eugenics laws, intensified stigmatization of disability, and increasing willingness to exclude disabled people from social and cultural life. The Immigration Act of 1882 prohibited entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Those placed in the categories of “lunatic” and “idiot” were supposed to be automatically excluded. The “public charge” provision was intended to encompass people with disabilities more generally, and decisions were left to the examining officer's discretion (United States Statutes at Large 1883:214). The criteria for excluding disabled people were steadily tightened as the eugenics movement and popular fears about the decline of the “national stock” gathered strength. The Immigration Act of 1891 replaced “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge” with “likely to become a public charge” (United States Statutes 1891:1084; emphases added). In 1907, the law was modified to deny entry to anyone judged “mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living” (United States Statutes 1907:899; emphasis added). Although nondisabled immigrants were still admitted unless found to be “likely to become a public charge,” disabled people were subject to this more rigorous standard.

Exclusions for mental defect were steadily expanded. In 1903, people with epilepsy were added, as well as “persons who have been insane within five years previous [or] who have had two or more attacks of insanity at [Page 915]any time previously” (United States Statutes 1903:1213). In 1907, “imbeciles” and “feeble-minded persons” were barred, in addition to “idiots” (United States Statutes 1907:898). In 1917, the classification of “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” was added, which inspection regulations described as including “various unstable individuals on the border line between sanity and insanity, such as persons with abnormal sex instincts.” Officials were instructed to exclude persons with “any mental abnormality whatever… which justifies the statement that the alien is mentally defective.” This provision, the regulations explained, was intended “as a means of excluding aliens of a mentally inferior type, not comprehended in the other provisions of the law, without being under the necessity, as formerly, of showing that they have a defect which may affect their ability to earn a living” (U.S. Public Health Service 1917:25–26, 28–29, 30–31).

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