Free A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen Page A

the increase of the general population.” According to Sharp, the “degenerate class” included “most of the insane, the epileptic, the imbecile, the idiotic, the sexual perverts; many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals, as well as the habitual pauper found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes.” 3 With the degenerative population that large, action was necessary.
    Laughlin had and would become widely recognized and effective as a leading proponent of restrictive immigration and forced-sterilization laws. The two strategies, he believed, together would ensure “the destiny of the American nation.” For the nation to succeed, he maintained, it must limit its already dangerously expanding pool of intellectually, physically, and morally defective citizens. Restrictive immigration laws, he would argue over and over again in print as well as before Congress, would “forbid the addition through immigration to our human breeding stock of persons of a lower natural hereditary constitution than that which constitutes the desired standard.” Forced-sterilization laws, accompanied by encouragement for those considered desirable for bearing children, would likewise limit the numbers of “socially inadequate, both within and not in custodial institutions,” and thus inhibit “the birth rate among degenerates.” 4 Laughlin became recognized as a leading scientist in both the United States and Germany. His model sterilization law became internationally renowned, eventually taken up by Adolf Hitler in his own bid for a national racial purity.
AN AMERICAN AMERICA
    Beginning with the Immigration Act of 1882 and continuing up until the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, immigration law increasingly restricted potential immigrants deemed defective—morally, physically, or intellectually—or even potentially defective. The 1882 law prohibited entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Immigration officials determined “public charge” at their own discretion. In 1891 the phrase “unable to take care of himself or herself” was replaced by the far wider and more fluid “
likely
to become a public charge.” In 1903 Congress specified those with epilepsy and in 1907 added “imbeciles” and “feeble-minded persons.” As one Ellis Island official wrote, feeble-mindedness conveniently served as a “sort of waste basket for many forms and degrees of weak-mindedness.” By 1907 immigration officials demanded a medical certificate from immigrants 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.” In 1917 immigration officials received instructions to reject all immigrants with “any mental abnormality whatever . . . which justifies the statement that the alien is mentally defective.” 5
    At Ellis Island, during the peak years of US immigration from 1870 to 1924, more than twenty-six million people entered the United States, driven by the lack of political, economic, and social opportunities in their home countries, and expanding opportunities, or at least the potential for them, in America. Potential immigrants, already limited by immigration laws that excluded nearly all Africans, Asians, and South Americans, went through a vigorous inspection process. The physical path through Ellis Island included a set of steep steps, several sharp turns, and, usually, dense crowding. Immigration agents prided themselves on their ability to make “snapshot diagnoses,” as each day a “handful of officials inspected between 2,000 and 5,000 people.” One official later wrote, “Defects, derangements and symptoms of disease which would not be disclosed by a so-called ‘careful physical examination,’ are often easily recognizable in watching a person twenty-five feet away.” 6