Justice  /  Q&A

A Journalist on How Anti-Immigrant Fervor Built in the Early Twentieth Century

A century ago, the invocation of science was key to making Americans believe that newcomers were inferior.
Immigrant women at Ellis Island.
Library of Congress

IC: How would you compare and contrast the current era of immigration restrictionism and anti-immigrant rhetoric with the one that you are writing about?

DO: I think that there are two primary differences. The first is that, one hundred years ago, the invocation of science was the key element in making the American public believe that these newcomers were inferior, whereas today it’s more an economic argument and an argument about crime. I don’t think either of those are the real reasons why there was the strong feeling then or strong feeling now. It’s a feeling of ethnic superiority. The difference is that today it’s Muslims and Latin Americans, and back then it was Jews and Italians.

IC: To what degree do you think that this restrictionist sentiment was a top-down phenomenon, and to what degree was it a grassroots phenomenon? Was it more about the “will of the people,” or was this about élites influencing how people think about an issue and then reflecting it back?

DO: A little bit of each. I do think that there would have been legislation and immigration restriction in 1924 without the eugenic argument. The eugenic argument cleansed it and made it palatable and made it not prejudiced. It made it acceptable with the American view of itself as a nation believing in freedom and liberty and equality—at least equality for white people. The nascent inborn feeling of prejudice that existed that would have kept these people out was valorized by the eugenic argument.

IC: What was it that you found, when you were researching this topic, that made you want to focus so much of your book on the scientific aspects of the immigration debate?

DO: The book began as a book about eugenics, and then I discovered the immigration angle and moved it into a book about immigration that was propped up by what I’d just learned about eugenics. The power of the eugenics movement, the ubiquity of the eugenics movement, in the years from 1910 until 1930, was everywhere. It was widely accepted. The only really strong voice against it was Franz Boas. Even the political opponents—they really couldn’t marshal any scientific argument. [The civil-rights lawyer] Louis Marshall, speaking of marshalling—he, of course, did, and pointed out, If these Nordics are so far superior, how come they’re disappearing? It was very hard for those who were for immigration to stand up to the mass ranks of Ivy League professors and the science that was coming out of Cold Spring Harbor. It was all over the country. It was imposing.