The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #73735

Amy Fairchild, Columbia Univ, 722 West 168th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10032, 212 305 0092, alf4@columbia.edu

Officers of the United States Public Health Service began examining immigrants for “loathsome and dangerous contagious diseases” at the nation’s borders in 1891 and, in 1903, immigrants suffering from diseases rendering them “likely to become a public charge.” They declared that medical inspection was “the most important feature of the medical sieve spread to sift out the physically and mentally defective.”

While touted and, indeed, initially intended as an important exclusionary tool, the assembly line of flesh and bone that processed some 25 million diseased immigrants was, for the vast majority, part of a process not of exclusion, but inclusion. Immigrant medical inspection served as the inaugural event in the life of the new industrial labor force; it worked to absorb them American industrial life and transform them into efficient industrial citizens with “proper” industrial values and attitudes. Only when groups of immigrants failed to conform to societal expectations about the industrial worker, did the immigrant medical exam work to exclude those groups at the nation’s borders on the understanding that they were not fit for industrial labor.

This is not to say that the PHS was merely an agent of abstract or benign Americanization. Nor was the PHS the principal agent of any kind of industrial assimilation. Indeed, the PHS never explicitly articulated discipline as the purpose of the medical exam. Yet so pervasive was the cultural imperative to discipline the immigrant laborer, so rooted were the immigrant diseases on which they came to focus in the capacity of the immigrant to serve industrial society, that the PHS exam mirrored the kind of effort taking place on the very floors of American factories. It became an analogy to the factory operating under the principles of scientific management. Thus, the process of entry into the US—which, we must understand, was far more than the 40 seconds in which the immigrant passed under the gaze of the PHS officer at the end of an inspection line in an American immigration station—was the opening segment of the process of Americanization not as an adjustment to American life and culture and society but as an adjustment to the industrial working class.

This understanding can help to can help to refocus our attention in the present on public policies seeking to control the behavior of immigrants within our borders rather than excluding immigrants at our borders.

Learning Objectives:

• From the historical examples discussed in this session, participants will understand the interplay between public health policy and national identity as they relate to the treatment of immigrants.

Keywords: History, Immigration

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.