Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    413/534 (page 397)
    the Medical application of the immigration law W. C. BILLINGS Ellis Island, New York The ultimate object of the science of Eugenics is a betterment of the race, therefore anything tending toward the achievement of that end is of neces¬ sity a subject of certain interest to members of this Congress. In the working out of that problem various determining factors are encountered and we, at this Congress, have listened to papers of absorbing interest on sex determination, mutation, the different behavior of chromosomes, in breeding and many other things, all of which are amazingly interesting steps toward the desired end, but, in addition to things of this sort, there are matters of intense practical importance, important at the present minute and demanding the immediate application of kno'wn measures. Granting that we cannot breed a superior line from inferior stock one of these im¬ mediately important questions, particularly to the United States, is that of immigration. The arriving immigrant of today is the father of tomorrow's citizen and upon tomorrow's citizen and his descendants depends the future of the country. These few remarks are made simply to establish the place of a paper with a title such as the present one in this Congress of Eugenics. It is surprising to realize the comparatively small number of people who have any conception of the actual methods employed by the Government in its efforts to hmit the admission of undesirable immigrants and this paper is written to give, in the very short time available, a superficial and general recital of the methods used, or perhaps it would be better to say the practical application of the provisions of the Immigration Law, and I shall deal exclusively with the medical provisions, the law of course containing many features other than medical, but the latter being of greatest interest at the moment. To avoid the confusion wliich seems to exist in the minds of a great many, I will say firstly that the quarantine law and the immigration law are entirely distinct one from the other. While it is true that the Quarantine Law and the medical features of the Immigration Law are carried out by officers detailed for that purpose from the same Corps, namely, the United States Public Health Service, nevertheless the laws themselves are entirely distinct and are administered by two distinct Departments of the 397