Comment: Health, Disease, and Immigration Policy

ALAN M. KRAUT

IMMIGRATION LONG HAS inspired fear in the hearts and minds of those charged with protecting the health and well-being of the United States. The most obvious threat always seems to come from those who are themselves the victims of infectious disease. Since the Middle Ages, fear of contagion inspired quarantine of travelers who appeared symptomatic and often those who did not yet appear to be sick. On this side of the Atlantic, seventeenth-century British colonies had quarantine laws on their books which became state laws after the American Revolution and laid the foundation for federal regulations. Later, medical inspections, such as those conducted at Ellis Island and other federal immigration depots, supplemented quarantine procedures. However, as Doug Baynton observes in this paper and a previously published article, by the nineteenth century concern extended far beyond infectious diseases that immigrants might bring, such as cholera and smallpox, and included disabling physical and mental conditions with their attendant social costs. Some Americans were unsympathetic to such new arrivals. In my own work, I quote an 1888 report delivered to the annual conference of superintendents of institutions for the feeble-minded clamoring for immigration restriction, lest the country find itself unable to bear the cost of institutional facilities needed to treat or at least confine the "sewage of vice and crime and physical weakness" washing ashore from Europe and the "nameless abominations" floating in from Asia.