Immigration and Mental “Fitness” Inspections
An introduction that is more of a description of what I am doing and where I think I am heading and almost certainly one that will need revision by the time I am done.
"A private interview between a young immigrant and an Ellis Island official. Two staff members [?] are also present, "Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.
I first wrote about this subject more than three years ago when I was part of a team that was examining the role of mental health assessments on immigrants that came to the U.S. attempting to seek asylum. How the field of psychology intersected and clashed with the field of law has created enormous problems from would-be asylum seekers that experienced the type of trauma that is presumably exactly the type of circumstances for which we have asylum laws. That work largely ended for me with the joint authorship of an article in the Tennessee Law Review in their winter 2022 edition.
I have since continued to work on it as time allows with a purpose that has expanded and changed course. Several of my colleagues on the project, some of who are clinical psychologists, were interested in the history of the involvement of people in their profession in immigration procedures. So rather than focus on the more narrow topic of how understandings of trauma might influence immigration procedures, I try to uncover the origins of “psychology” in the immigration process.
So I begin here with an account of what I think this article is going to be about. I should note that I have already written somewhere between 20,000 - 30,000 words. But they are not sufficiently organized around an argument or a cohesive narrative. So I am not promising that in what will follow, but perhaps by the time I am done (years from now?) I will have exactly that: arguments and a compelling story.
I put psychology in quotes above quite deliberately and explaining why is a great place to start because it both encapsulates much of the rest of my research thus far and illustrates a significant sticking point in my attempts to wrap my head around what exactly I am writing about. Let me explain.
The period I focus on are the years between 1891 and 1924. This was a period in which immigration legislation, public health, and the social sciences rapidly developed. That means that there were a lot of uncertainties and variations in the meaning of those topics. In the case of my research, they interacted–the people and policies–and there were not clear boundaries or established disciplines with precise spheres of operation or even agreement in what the new knowledge that was being produced meant or its legitimacy. In other words, there was a great deal of upheaval in what we might understand as “expertise” and even “knowledge.”
What this project attempts to understand, therefore, are three questions:
What was the relationship between health professionals and the federal government in the context of immigration policy. And, here immediately, is where we encounter the complexity noted above. Initially the health professionals involved in immigration policy were medical professionals, doctors, or more commonly known then as surgeons. However, over time, trained psychologists–or those that were trained as medical doctors but took an interest in psychology–and similar professionals that were interested in intelligence, and health professionals that were interested in public health became involved in the formulation and implementation of immigration policy.
Given the uncertainty of the new immigration provisions that vaguely defined a mental qualification for admission to the United States, how did implementation develop and who was on the ground making those statutory interpretations? One of the most significant issues in this process was the uncertainty over what it meant to be an “idiot,” an “imbecile,” or “feebleminded.” Feeblemindedness or what they understood as a lack of intelligence is where they struggled mightily. They were uncertain about whether signs of feeblemindedness were genetic–a position held by eugenicists, for example–and therefore insurmountable and likely to make the person in question a burden on their community (for generations to come); or, was a consequence of the lack of a “modern,” western education, which could be corrected. And in either case where the line was on the spectrum of feeblemindedness that made one excludable.
As the number of exclusions based on an immigrant’s mental capacity or health expanded, along with the experience (and experimentation) of the health officials implementing the laws, what influence did the new knowledge about psychology and public health, and the people creating that new knowledge, have on the debates and congressional acts passed during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Interestingly, the certainty of the answers to those three questions diminishes a bit more as I move from the first to the third. The complexity of these topics makes writing about them frustrating at times, because I lack the certainty I would prefer, but is also the root of the interest or quest to understand for me. As it’s been said many times, “writing is thinking,” so hopefully by the end of all this, I will be more certain than I am now.
I will start with a brief survey of the inspection regime in immigration law before 1891.
October 24 edit: Upon reflection, it occurred to me that question number three basically restates question number one. The third question was meant to address the developments in immigration policy and the role of psychologists in the late 1910s as both of those topics had become more established and had a history of engagement with one another. But obviously that is just an evolution of the question about their relationship as described in question number one. Thus, I have two main questions: what was the relationship between health professionals and immigration policy–its formulation and implementation and, with respect to the implementation piece, how did the uncertainties of the knowledge they were supposedly experts on and for which they were being called upon because of, transpire as they struggled to exam millions of new potential Americans for admission or exclusion?