{"id":273281,"date":"2022-09-26T14:37:53","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T19:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=273281"},"modified":"2022-09-25T22:08:39","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T03:08:39","slug":"history-proponents-eugenics-population-control-abortion-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/history-proponents-eugenics-population-control-abortion-immigration\/","title":{"rendered":"History Highlight: Proponents of eugenics, population control, and abortion opposed immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abortion advocates are attempting to paint the pro-life movement as racist by using the issue of immigration to claim that the motivation behind making abortion illegal is derived from an effort to increase the births of white babies. But this entire premise is absurd on its face, given the fact that for decades, abortion<\/a> \u2014 which is tethered<\/a> to eugenics \u2014\u00a0has disproportionately targeted Black Americans<\/a> and other minorities. But even more to the point, the original promoters of the anti-immigration movement were aligned with the same eugenic movers and shakers<\/a> that brought us abortion and Planned Parenthood.<\/p>\n

According to the Harry H. Laughlin papers<\/a> at Truman State University, “The American eugenics movement greatly influenced U.S. policies regarding immigration. Policy writers were interested in the eugenics movement and immigration because the nativist side of eugenics focused on keeping the American race ‘pure’ from immigrants who were seen as ‘unfit.'”<\/p>\n

Eugenics movement focused on preventing the ‘unfit’ from reproducing… and from entering the country<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The very first anti-immigration group, the\u00a0Immigration Restriction League (IRL)<\/a>, was founded in 1894 by three Harvard College graduates \u2014\u00a0Charles Warren,\u00a0Robert DeCourcy Ward,\u00a0and\u00a0Prescott Farnsworth Hall<\/a> \u2014\u00a0in response to an increasing sense of invasion of the United States by ‘undesirable immigrants’ that threatened their sense of the American way of life,\u00a0according to Harvard College’s Houghton Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The League’s goal, wrote researcher Adam S. Cohen<\/a>, was “to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was ‘a race question, pure and simple,’ Ward said. ‘It is fundamentally a question as to\u2026 what races shall dominate in the country.’ League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage,” Cohen added.<\/p>\n

The League was founded in Boston, but quickly spread to many other cities across the United States \u2014 and they chose\u00a0Hall, who originally proposed<\/a> calling the League the ‘Eugenic Immigration League,’ to be\u00a0Chairman<\/a> of the Committee on Immigration of the Eugenics Section of the American Genetic Association.<\/p>\n

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Immigration Restriction League Prescott F Hall Secretary 1904 National Archives<\/p><\/div>\n

“Segregation” to prevent “inferior stocks”<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In Hall’s Eugenics, Ethics And Immigration<\/em>, he wrote<\/a>, “The attempt to improve race stocks in recent times has, therefore, taken the form, not of killing off the less fit, but of preventing their coming into the State, either by being born into it or by migration. Eugenics includes, not only the prevention of unfit, but the conscious attempt to produce the more fit; indeed, it is in the latter sense that the word is most often used. Strictly speaking, however, it must include all attempts to improve the physical equipment of the individual in so far as he acquires it by heredity. The recent emphasis upon eugenics is a direct outcome of modern science.”<\/p>\n

“The fact is, that our immigration laws, as at present administered, do not screen out the unfit so as to preserve the status quo, to say nothing of promoting eugenic improvement,” Hall also wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his book “Fatal Misconception<\/a>,” author Matthew Connelly cites Hall as stating, “The moral seems to be this: Eugenics among individuals is encouraging the propagation of the fit and limiting or preventing the multiplication of the unfit… Immigration restriction is a species of\u00a0segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anti-immigration laws crafted by eugenicists<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Eugenicists’ influence within the early anti-immigration movement was confirmed by University of Virginia historian Paul A. Lombardo<\/a>, who wrote:<\/p>\n

In 1911, Immigration Restriction League President Prescott Hall asked his former Harvard classmate Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office<\/a> (ERO) for assistance to influence Congressional debate on immigration. Davenport recommended a survey to determine the national origins of ‘hereditary defectives’ in American prisons, mental hospitals and other charitable institutions. Davenport appointed<\/a> ERO colleague Harry Laughlin to manage the research program.<\/em><\/p>\n

Laughlin was a founding member<\/a> and\u00a0president<\/a> of the American Eugenics Society and the architect of the 1924 anti-immigration act. Laughlin joined others of his day in promoting forced sterilization and even\u00a0authored<\/a> a model eugenics sterilization law<\/a>. In 1933, Laughlin\u2019s ideas were\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0by Margaret Sanger\u2019s Birth Control Review, and in 1938 he\u00a0became part of<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Citizen\u2019s Committee on Planned Parenthood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1936, Laughlin \u201creceived an\u00a0honorary<\/a>\u00a0degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg as \u2018a pioneer in the science of race cleansing,\u2019\u201d according to Lombardo<\/a>.\u00a0Smithsonian Magazine identified<\/a>\u00a0Laughlin as\u00a0“[o]ne of the primary examples” of how eugenics played a role in immigration law.<\/p>\n

In 1920, Laughlin appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization<\/a>, where Lombardo says “he argued that the ‘American’ gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally defective immigrants \u2013 primarily from eastern and southern Europe.” Laughlin’s research “culminated in his 1924 testimony to Congress in support of a eugenically-crafted immigration restriction bill,” where Lombardo claims the “resulting law, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, was designed consciously to halt the immigration of supposedly ‘dysgenic’ Italians and eastern European Jews, whose numbers had mushroomed during the period from 1900 to 1920… The 1924 Act ended the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history.”<\/p>\n

Truman State University’s special collections website<\/a> points out that the 1924 anti-immigration act “set an annual ceiling on the number of immigrants allowed entrance into the U.S., regardless of origin, except Arians, who were totally excluded,” they claimed.<\/p>\n

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Harry Laughlin author of Immigration Act signed Committee for Planned Parenthood<\/p><\/div>\n

Margaret Sanger board director concerned about the “rising tide of color”<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, who\u00a0believed<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cnon-white races must be excluded from America,\u201d was connected<\/a> to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and authored a book titled, “The Rising Tide of Color.” Stoddard was a journalist and Exalted Cyclops of the Massachusetts\u00a0chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.<\/a>\u00a0He served<\/a> on Sanger\u2019s National Council, her American Birth Control League (ABCL)\u00a0Board of Directors<\/a>, and the conference committee of the\u00a0First American Birth Control Conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to an article published<\/a> by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:<\/p>\n

Stoddard testified to Congress on immigration issues in the 1920s and 1930s. He supported restricting immigration to the United States, and he particularly opposed the\u00a0admission of groups he\u00a0considered to be ‘undesirable’ or racially inferior. On one occasion, Stoddard referred to refugees from the Middle East who were fleeing violence as ‘parasitical’ and ‘mongrel’ people who would be ‘very undesirable immigrants.’\u00a0He also supported laws that would exclude Asians from entering the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

Author Matthew Connelly\u00a0wrote<\/a> of Stoddard, “Stoddard claimed that white men were responsible for their own demise, because they had reduced famine and disease and had thus removed checks to population increase among other races.”<\/p>\n