Foreign Bodies

ED: We’ve been talking about how immigration restrictions have grown over time. It reminded me of an interview I did a couple of years ago about another type of immigration ban that was in place for more than a century. In 1882, a new federal immigration law barred anyone who was, as the law said, a convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge. And that list of exclusions included children and adults with any number of physical disabilities or perceived defects.

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: The list would include varicose veins, flat feet, hearing impairment, vision impairments, short stature, poor physique.

ED: This is University of Iowa historian Douglas Baynton. He says it’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants with disabilities were kept out of the US. For one thing, discrimination didn’t begin at Ellis Island.

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Because the shipping companies did their own inspections, because if they brought an immigrant over who was rejected, they would have to pay a fine for that person and they’d have to bring them back at no charge. The ticket sellers, ticket agents who are spread all over Europe also did their own inspections. These were non-medical people, but they would refuse to sell tickets to people who they thought would be excluded because they would be penalized by the shipping companies.

ED: What this suggests to me is that people with really debilitating disabilities might not have made it this far.

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Oh, that’s right. Well, they wouldn’t have gotten through the initial screens. And also if they had a mobility impairment, they wouldn’t have been able to get on the ship in the first place.

ED: Right, right. So can you give me an example of what this process actually looked like in practice? You know these officials deciding sort of on the spur of the moment that somebody was defective.

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: There was an Armenian Turk in 1895 by the name of Donabet Mousekian, who was diagnosed as suffering from feminism. That was the term that was used on his medical certificate. And it referred to a lack of male sexual organs or underdeveloped organs as a result of what we now know to be a hormonal deficiency.

ED: How would they– How would they know that? It must have been from a facial trait?

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Yes.

ED: Because I know from reading your article that basically people are walking by and when they see somebody who seems defective, they write an L on their back. Is that right?

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Right, there was a whole code for different kinds of defects. So X for mental defect, L for lame. So the first inspection was really just a snapshot diagnosis as the immigrants streamed past the inspectors. And they would pull some people out, chalk on their back, and then give them a closer inspection.

So with Mousekian, his hearing was extraordinarily brief. It was as if the board that was examining him was very uncomfortable. In this case, one of them said I move to exclude. Is likely to become a public charge. Second panel member said, I second the motion. And third said he is excluded. And that was the entire hearing.

But he appealed to Washington, which all immigrants had a right to do. And he wrote in his appeal that he had always supported himself. He was a photographer, a weaver and dyer of rugs, and a cook, had worked at all of these. And he wrote in his letter, I am not ill and have no contagious disease. This is not my fault. It has come from God and my mother. What harm can I do by being deprived of male organs?

When he left, he was fleeing the violent oppression of Armenians in Turkey and had been made to renounce his citizenship when he left. So he explained this in his letter. And he said, better that you should kill me now than send me back. And the Armenian genocide took place just a few years after he was sent back.

ED: So much of this focused around not being able to find work. What kind of evidence would they have of that? I mean, was that actually true, you think?

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: That’s the thing. There is a widespread assumption that a disability means being incapable of working. So in the case of Mousekian, there really seems to be no reason to assume he wouldn’t be able to find work. But there was the immigration service memo that explained why they should not be admitted, which was that their abnormality becomes known to their fellow workers who mock them and taunt them, which impedes the work at hand. And so employers know this and are unlikely to hire them.

ED: So it’s for their own good in many ways.

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Well, basically he was saying that we have to discriminate against them now, because they’re likely to encounter discrimination later.

ED: So you say that these restrictions grew over time. Does that mean that they grew increasingly accepted? I mean, was there a sort of turn against people with disabilities at the beginning of the 20th century or was this just a sort of a more bureaucratic momentum that built?

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a lot of different factors. One of them is the standardization of society in the Industrial Age. The term normal comes into common use near the end of the 19th century. And it becomes a very powerful concept.

People used to talk about human nature, and then it shifted around the turn of the 20th century to a concern with what is normal– counting people, measuring people, seeing what the bell curve shows us about what are normal characteristics. And it’s tied in with a lot of changes. The growth of cities, industrialization, where not only do you need standardized parts and replaceable parts, but standardized and replaceable human beings. Workers, people with disabilities don’t fit as a cog in that larger machine.

ED: So how long were these laws on the books? I mean you say they sort of peaked in the early 20th century. Then what happened?

DOUGLAS BAYNTON: The immigration laws do not take out the language having to do with specific disabilities or defects that are excludable until the 1990 Act. And still today, we exclude people who are likely to become a public charge. And that’s still a means of keeping people out with disabilities. And so it still goes on.

Douglas Baynton is a historian at the University of Iowa and the author of “Defectives in the Land– Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics.” We’ll bring you the second installment in our series on immigration restrictions next month.

JOANNE: Well, that’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your burning history questions. You’ll find us a BackStoryRadio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.