While President Trump later denounced the anti-Asian prejudices that were stirred by his own use of the terms “foreign virus” and, “Chinese virus,” in early 2020, the damage was done. A community was put on notice, “You are the ‘other’ and you endanger us all by your presence.” This is hardly the first time.
Sociologist Erving Goffman observed that the most essential version of stigma was the abomination of the body. Bodies associated with disease appear especially threatening because the disease-causing contagion cannot be detected with the naked eye or easily avoided. Throughout human history, groups defined by race or religion have been persecuted because of their association with disease. The Back Death of the Middle Ages was blamed on Jews in various European communities. Ferocious physical persecution resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, often by torture.
Throughout American history, the appearance of an epidemic has often been blamed on a specific immigrant or ethnic group. The cholera epidemic of 1832, which ravaged the east coast of the United States was blamed on Irish Catholic immigrants who were arriving in ever larger numbers on American shores and settling in east coast cities. The newcomers were poor and lived in congested conditions, often in shanties on the shores of rivers without access to clean water or uncontaminated food, making them all the more vulnerable to infection. Stigmatization of the Irish reinforced by their arrival during the Second Great Awakening, when the religious passions of Protestant evangelicals, manifested in a virulent anti-Catholicism. Blaming Irish newcomers for the cholera outbreak seemed only logical within the context of religious antagonisms that had been transported across the Atlantic as certainly as germs on vectors.
States, and later the federal government, took measures to prevent the arrival of diseases from abroad. Each state had quarantine laws dating to before the American Revolution and enforced by state officers. In the antebellum era when states oversaw the inspection and interrogation of newcomers, there were state immigration depots such as Castle Garden in New York, which opened in 1855. The Quarantine Act of 1878 shifted quarantine powers from the states to the federal government. The relinquishing of state prerogative in the matter was gradual. In addition to quarantine protection, after 1890, federal physicians belonging to the U.S. Marine Hospital Service (later renamed the U.S. Public Health Service) were stationed at Federal depots such as those on Angel Island in San Francisco and Ellis Island in New York. They stood watch over the nation’s health, admitting the healthy and those sufficiently robust to support themselves. However, even such government surveillance with increasingly sophisticated medical instrumentation and diagnostic techniques did not curb xenophobic hysteria or the association of immigrant groups and their behaviors with specific diseases.