UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States experienced a remarkable growth of the immigrant population and witnessed scientific and medical developments that facilitated the selection of desirable and respectable immigrants. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, the American government passed several immigration acts to exclude newcomers with mental or physical defects and expanded the excludable classes of immigrants. The actual number of deportees was small, but their presence alerted the American public of the danger of the "new" immigrants. Compared to physical defects, insanity was difficult to detect due to its relative invisibility and cultural differences in its manifestations and diagnoses. Nevertheless, insanity was often discussed to prove the undesirable nature of the immigrant population, and the popular eugenic ideas of the time period justified its exclusion. Financial concerns at the American borders also posed a problem in detecting immigrants with mental defects. In 1912, against the criticism that immigration officials failed to implement the immigration acts, the Acting Secretary of the Department of Immigration asserted: "A dollar will only go so far, and we cannot get two dollars worth of work for one dollar." The medical deportation of the "alien" insane was not just a political measure against diseased immigrants; it reflected social anxieties of the time period, and the causes and symptoms of insanity among immigrants revealed deeply ingrained gender and racial stereotypes of the "strangers in the land."