We Have All Been Here Before and Will Be Again

Eli,

I'll have to take a look at The American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade.

I read a book called "Illiberal Reformers," by Thomas Leonard that explores various aspects of the Progressive movement's involvement in immigration  and eugenics.

Leonard writes:

Hostility to immigrants, like race prejudice, was nothing new in America. As Rogers Smith, Gary Gerstle, Desmond King, and other scholars remind us, American nativism, like American racism and sexism, was not the occasional mild fever. It was a chronic, debilitating illness. [5]

America had a long and ignominious tradition of nativist intolerance, dating to the short—lived Aliens Act of 1798, which empowered the president to arrest or deport any alien deemed dangerous. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Know Nothings of the American Party gained widespread political support by vilifying Irish immigrants fleeing famine and German immigrants fleeing revolution as un—American threats to the nation.

What did change, beginning in the 1880s, was the role of the administrative state in immigration regulation and government’s use of social scientific expertise to investigate and advise on immigration policy.

One of the tools proposed to restrict immigration was the minimum wage law:

A legal minimum wage, applied to immigrants and those already working in America, ensured that only the productive workers were employed. The economically unproductive, those whose labor was worth less than the legal minimum, would be denied entry, or, if already employed, would be idled. For economic reformers who regarded inferior workers as a threat, the minimum wage provided an invaluable service. It identified inferior workers by idling them. So identified, they could be dealt with. The unemployable would be would be removed to institutions, or to celibate labor colonies. The inferior immigrant would be removed back to the old country or to retirement. The woman, as we shall in Chapter 10, would be removed to the home, where she could meet her obligations to family and race.

The whole book is worth a read but it is uncomforatble reading for today's Progressives.

Bill