Immigration, Disease, and the Body Politic: The Legal Legacy of the Immigration Act of 1924 as a Eugenic Project
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Date
2025-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Eugenics in the United States casts a long shadow over our laws, values, and culture. The American eugenics movement was one of the first to describe immigration as a problem to be regulated and, eventually, solved. The question of immigration is central to how a country perceives its national health. Although the general American ethos prides itself on being a nation built and strengthened by immigration, its policy and litigation on the subject reveal strong eugenic anxieties towards non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants beginning in the early twentieth century, and restricted immigration accordingly. The Immigration Act of 1924 (colloquially known as the Johnson-Reed Act) was a watershed piece of legislation put forward by two prominent eugenicists and placed the first quota system into law that heavily favored Western and Northern Europeans (Ludmerer 61). The policy argues for the associations of undesirable immigrants with disease, disfigurement, and “feeble-mindedness”, which was upheld by a series of legal cases and still impacts immigration law today. There is a detectable throughline from the eugenic rhetoric of immigration in the Progressive Era to the tactics used by recent administrations to enact and popularize race-restricted immigration policy, targeting new immigrant groups but inflaming old fears.
Description
Center for Ethics and Human Values Award for Civil Discourse at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum
Keywords
legal studies, immigration, eugenics, bioethics