Introduction of Immigration Inspections
Although the federal and state governments largely maintained an “open door” to immigrants for the nation’s first century, there were some legal requirements states imposed on the character of arriving residents. These laws were confined to an interest in the movement, both foreign and interstate, of several types of immigrants: criminals, paupers, slave or free blacks, followers of certain religions, those with threatening political views, and individuals with contagious diseases.[1] As early as 1837, several states prohibited the immigration of “idiots and lunatics” and Massachusetts required passenger companies to post $1,000 bonds for suspected “lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged or infirm” immigrants.[2] However, these early laws did not mandatorily exclude the entry of foreign passengers and although Congress raised the question of preventing undesirable immigrants from departing foreign ports (a concept referred to as “remote control”) in the early nineteenth century, there was no regular inspection process for arriving immigrants.[3] With a surge of Irish immigration in the 1840s, preceded by a cholera epidemic in the 1830s many blamed on the Irish, the British government attempted to provide medical inspections before their departure.[4] Following a second outbreak of cholera in 1849, the state of New York opened Castle Garden on the southern tip of Manhattan as an immigration receiving center and implemented some formal quarantine and medical inspection procedures. State officials began to look more carefully for evidence of disease or those subject to “special bonds under the law–as blind persons, cripples, lunatics, or any others who are likely to become a future charge,” and by the mid-1850s similar procedures were “instituted by all states with busy ports of arrival.”[5]
The first significant effort by the federal government to restrict immigration in 1875, the Page Act, permitted the inspection by a customs official of any subject arriving from an Asian country to determine whether they were a prostitute or had been deported from their home country for committing a non-political crime.[6] In 1882, several months after passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress passed “An act to regulate Immigration” that prohibited any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself.” The law authorized the Treasury Department, the branch of the federal government charged with enforcing immigration laws through its custom officials, to contract with state commissions, boards, or officers “to examine into the condition of passengers arriving at the ports…to go on board of and through any such ship or vessel” to inspect the arriving passengers.[7] In 1891, Congress expanded the grounds for exclusion to include among other circumstances, “all idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease.” In section 7 of the act, Congress created the office of superintendent of immigration within the Treasury Department, led by a commissioner appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. Section 8 mandated that to aid in the detection of immigrants with medical or mental concerns, surgeons of the Marine Hospital Service were to conduct a medical examination of arriving immigrants.[8]
Health Inspection of Immigrants in the 19th Century. National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The 1891 law reflected a growing dislike for immigrants in the United States. Initially, the rationale for excluding certain immigrants was unabashedly racial. But the addition of these qualifications that referenced an immigrant’s mental and physical soundness grew out of several developments at the turn of the century that included an interest in public health, particularly in urban areas; not coincidentally medical experts led this concern at a time that increasingly privileged scientific expertise. This concern over the relationship between immigration and public health that formally began with the 1891 immigration law grew into a topic of debate and policy making for a generation of politicians, criminologists, psychologists, physicians, intelligence testers, and eugenicists. For many, the questions raised by immigration and the public health were existential. In a volume of articles on the treatment of mental diseases, Thomas Salmon, a “Passed Assistant Surgeon” with the United States Public Health Service wrote, “No other country has ever had such a mighty and sustained flow of humanity as that which has transferred more than twenty-eight million people from Europe, Asia, and Africa to the United States since 1820. Every social and economic problem has been profoundly influenced by this great tide, and it can be shown that not the least of its effects has been that exerted upon the public health.”[9]
[1] Kevin R. Johnson et al., Understanding Immigration Law, 3rd ed. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2019), 46.
[2] Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 75; Kunal M. Parker, “State, Citizenship, and Territory: The Legal Construction of Immigrants in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 19, n. 3 (Autumn, 2001): 610; Benjamin J. Klebaner, “State and Local Immigration Regulation in the United States before 1882,” International Review of Social History 3, n. 2 (August 1958): 269-295.
[3] Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 110-13; see also Elliott Young, “Beyond Borders: Remote Control and the Continuing Legacy of Racism in Immigration Legislation,” in A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965, edited by Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu, and María Cristina García (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
[4] Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 32-5.
[5] Friedrich Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration (New York: Arno Press, 1969; orig. 1870), 105-24, quoted in Kraut, Silent Travelers, 36; Kraut, Silent Travelers, 36. Kraut also notes that despite pressure for the federal government to assert authority over quarantining passengers, states retained control over all health matters.
[6] The Page Act of 1875 (Immigration Act), 43rd Cong., Sess. II, Ch. 141, Sec. 5, 1875.
[7] An act to regulate Immigration, 47th Cong., Sess. I, Ch. 376, Sec. 2, 1882.
[8] An act in amendment to the various acts relative to immigration and the importation of aliens under contract or agreement to perform labor, 51st Cong., Sess. II, Ch. 551, 1891.
[9] Thomas W. Salmon, “Immigration and the Mixture of Races in Relation to the Mental Health of the Nation,” in The Modern Treatment of Nervous and Mental Diseases eds. William A. White and Smith Ely Jelliffee (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1913), 241.