In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, politicians from New York to California believed that the large number of immigrants entering the country — Latin Americans, Asians, Italians, and Jews — represented a threat to the wellbeing of the “national stock.” In this era of eugenics, politicians, intellectuals, and medical professionals alike believed that unchecked migration from undesirable countries would lead to the “mongrelization” of the country and the rapid spread of diseases. Violent crime, insanity, and immigration were rhetorically connected by nativists who sought to severely curtail the number of immigrants from the “lower races” to enter the country.
Politicians and journalists sharpened these fears by suggesting “insane” and “criminal” migrants were intentionally being brought to the United States. As the Los Angeles Times claimed in 1905, “In many instances insane Mexicans [are] smuggled” across the border to receive psychiatric care in the US. Similar fears were prevalent for Chinese, Japanese, and Southern and Eastern European migrants. They became the targets of unfounded political theories, suggesting that foreign governments were deliberately sending their insane to the United States. Immigrants were, in fact, disproportionately institutionalized in the United States’ psychiatric facilities. This, however, was more likely attributable to societal biases regarding the health and wellness of immigrants — which has been detailed by historians such as John McKiernan-Gonzalez, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, and Natalia Molina — than to any truth within such conspiracy theories.
Rhetoric suggesting ties between disease, insanity, and immigration had material repercussions on the lives of migrants. Over the course of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, Congress passed increasingly stringent immigration policies. In 1882, the United States passed one of its first ever pieces of federal immigration legislation, barring those with physical or mental illness from entering the country. After that, the country’s immigration architecture expanded dramatically, adding requirements for medical examinations, legal provisions for deportation, and personnel for enforcement. The government of California even created its own statewide office dedicated to deporting any “insane alien” who was hospitalized in the state.
The result was that immigrants diagnosed with mental illness were physically removed from psychiatric hospitals by immigration agents, placed aboard trains, ships, and automobiles, and deported to their countries of origin. Recent works by historians Ethan Blue and Elliot Young have detailed the deportation process in these early years of federal U.S. immigration enforcement, suggesting that the institutionalization and deportation of insane aliens set the foundation for the country’s present deportation regime. The legal justification for deportation was that these individuals were “public charges,” unjust burdens upon the nation’s taxpayers.