August 2, 2019--Bigotry and Eugenics

I just finished reading Daniel Okrent's Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America.

If you haven't, pick up a copy. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what underlies our current debate about immigration, legal and illegal. It is a distressing history but must be confronted and exposed if we want to work our way past this sorry chapter of our history.

To get a flavor for it, here is an excerpt from the review in the Washington Post--

Okrent’s central theme is the gradual and portentous convergence of two originally autonomous movements of the period just before World War I. The movement to restrict immigration gained steam in the 1890s among New England patricians like Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. 

They were repelled by the massive influx of people from Eastern and Southern Europe that began in the previous decade. Simultaneously, the movement to improve the human species by promoting reproduction by individuals of the finest stock began in England and spread to social elites in America. 

This eugenics movement gained superficial plausibility from Charles Darwin’s emphasis on inheritance. Eugenics became relevant to immigration restriction when ersatz scientists divided even Europeans into distinctive races and ascribed to each race differing levels of intelligence and character. 

Although the science of genetics had established well before World War I that intelligence, honesty, promiscuity, sloth and other traits central to eugenics were not carried by single genes and did not define races, restrictionists seized eugenics as an apparently scientific basis for keeping Jews and Italians and Poles and Hungarians out of the United States.

And to do so they established country-by-country quota systems that endured until 1965.