In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deaf and disabled potential immigrants were routinely sent away from American ports of entry because they were deemed “defective.” Take the case of Moische Fischmann, a deaf Jewish blacksmith who arrived at Ellis Island in December 1913. Although he was fleeing Russian pogroms and faced “possibl(e) destruction” if deported, Fischmann, like Mooktie, was denied permission to enter the country.
More than a century later, the disabled immigrant has again become a lightning rod for public discourse around immigration in the twenty-first century. Their bodies are metaphorically dissected and weighed as their stories are tossed around on social media. One example is Juan Gaspar-Garcia, who was arrested by the US Department of Homeland Security at the tent-raising company where he worked on April 17, 2018.
A Guatemalan immigrant, he had graduated from a special needs program in Florida and became the focus of an online petition set up by his sister and family, who said that he needed care because he had Down’s syndrome. Gaspar-Garcia was eventually released from detention and his case is now pending.
In the same month, Charles Mukherjee, who was seeking asylum in the UK with his parents from Pakistan, was detained during a routine sign-in at the Home Office and separated from his parents. Charles has learning disabilities along with epilepsy and has had seizures since being detained by authorities. Separated as they are by the decades, the stories of Mooktie and Moische, Juan and Charles all illustrate the continuing legacies of eugenics in shaping immigration discourse and policy.
Eugenics (meaning “well-born”) was first coined in the work of statistician and geographer Francis Galton in 1883 “to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.”
Proponents of eugenics advocated “positive eugenics” (encouraging physically and intellectually “fit” classes of society to marry and have more children) and “negative eugenics” — or policies intended to limit the nuptiality and fertility of “eugenically unfit” classes (including sterilization and euthanasia). By the end of the nineteenth century, eugenics was a transnational discourse which translated into policies in spaces as diverse as the Ottoman Empire, Brazil, China, Puerto Rico, and Germany. Certainly, public discourse and policy on immigration in the US, Canada, and Australia were indelibly shaped by eugenics.
Francis Galton himself claimed that the “ablest race” — the ancient Greeks — maintained their fitness because “Athens opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately. For her social life was such that none but very able men could take any pleasure in it.”8 Eventually, eugenics provided what appeared to be a “scientific rationale” for justifying and amplifying anti-immigrant sentiment.