Quarantine and the "Disease" of Immigration

Creating boundaries between groups to prevent entry of undesirable agents of disease (an essential element in the concept of quarantine) can be seen in the tacit philosophy of some of the United States' immigration laws. Immigration laws have traditionally sought to prevent entry of anyone who would create a public burden. The philosophy of immigration laws early in this century, however, carried the notion of quarantine much further than the restricted entry of the diseased or disabled. Hereditarian theories of race and racial superiority were buttressed by the discoveries of Mendelian genetics and reports of animal-breeding experiments, all of which combined to create the eugenics movement. Those Americans alarmed by the influx of immigration from southern and eastern Europe late in the nineteenth century found, in what was then modern genetics, "scientific" support for their long-standing fear: Undesirable races would pollute the Anglo-Saxon germ plasm if allowed to enter the United States and to intermarry with the extant population. There were many exponents of this theory, which so closely resembled a simple view of the germ causation of disease: If a germ entered the body, a specific disease would be caused—neither the environment, nor educational efforts, nor biological variability of the individual infected by the germ were important. This racial theory surely demanded a line of defense around the racially pure, just as any quarantine drew the line against the biological contaminant, the cholera germ.

The ideas calling for a racial quarantine are summed up in Madison

Grant's The Passing of the Great Race , a pessimistic account, published in 1916, of undesirable immigration run amok, and of the glory of the Nordic race gradually fading into oblivion. Using eugenics theory to impart a "scientific" justification for his fears, Grant warned that such intermarriage "gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type." Accordingly, racial disease could be prevented only by excluding carriers of biological contamination—the central concept of quarantine. This outlook triumphed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which drastically limited the influx of Europeans whom a person like Madison Grant would have found undesirable. The act was so effective that a year after its enactment the commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island reported that now almost all immigrants looked exactly like Americans.^[17]