The goal of this lesson is for students to make direct connections between historic and current immigration policies in the United States and eugenic ideas.
Eugenic ideologies have significantly influenced U.S. immigration policies, most notably the Immigration Act of 1924. This legislation established quotas favoring Northern and Western European immigrants while severely restricting those from other regions, including Latin America. The act aimed to preserve the alleged "purity" of the American population, reflecting the eugenicists' desire to engineer society through selective immigration.¹² These policies not only limited the diversity of the immigrant population but also reinforced racial hierarchies and xenophobic attitudes that we, unfortunately, see continuing to this day.
Journalist Daniel Okrent explores the U.S. immigration system during the turn of the 20th century in his book, The Guarded Gate. He shows how politicians “came to embrace the racist junk science of the eugenics movement in order to keep their country the way they wanted.”¹³ He goes on, “Scientific authority is telling us these ideas as facts, therefore it’s not because we don’t like these people, but we don’t dare let them corrupt the American bloodstream.”¹³ As harsh as these words seem today, Calvin Coolidge wrote a column in 1921 explicitly embracing these views. The result of which was the Immigration Act of 1924. Because of the quotas it imposed on southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as banning Asian immigrants outright, it “fundamentally reshaped immigration in the U.S. for decades, until President Lyndon Johnson overhauled the immigration system in 1965 amid his Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Movement.”¹³
Recently, Donald Trump introduced a new immigration plan to “shift the focus” from giving many visas to families of those already here, to a “merit” system. This plan, he said, would “promote integration, assimilation, and national unity” by requiring a civics test and making admission decisions based on points for categories such as age, English proficiency, and level of education.¹³ This type of policy is quite similar to the implicitly biased eugenic immigration and exclusion policies we’ve seen throughout history.
Hispanic communities have been systematically marginalized in the United States time and time again because of biased testing and the legitimization of racial hierarchies by academic institutions. In William H. Tucker’s essay "Racism and Intelligence Testing," he shows how IQ tests were used to track students, which often led to Hispanic children being placed in remedial or vocational programs. These tests did not account for multilingualism, cultural background, or socioeconomic factors, and as a result, many Hispanic students were deemed “intellectually deficient” and denied academic opportunities.¹⁴
The W.E.B. DuBois Society article, "Race and Intelligence: The Foundations of the IQ Debate," again reinforces the point that IQ tests weren’t about measuring intelligence—they were, in fact, about controlling people perceived as different or lesser. “The very concept of IQ was shaped by a desire to quantify and control marginalized populations.”¹⁵ Rather than serving as neutral measures, intelligence tests became “tools of exclusion”¹⁵ and helped to reinforce the false idea that certain groups were naturally less adept or able.
Present students with the sources cited in this section and ask them to reflect on how these ideas relate to previous discussions we’ve had about identity and labels. This can be done first with an individual journal reflection, then a pair share or small-group share-out, and then a whole-class discussion. I always recommend pair or small-group sharing before asking students to share whole-class, to give them a chance to say their ideas out loud first to a smaller, less intimidating audience. I do think it is important to not only have them pair-share or share in small groups, however, but extend into a whole-group discussion so students may hear from others in the class and to allow the teacher to guide the discussion; especially if there are any misguided or misinformed questions or ideas that surface-- this could be easily missed if a whole class discussion is left out.
