This is a research paper I wrote for Prof. Reed Ueda's seminar on "Our Road to DACA and the Wall" in December 2019. In face of the epidemic in 2020, I find it important for the media, scholars and activists alike to rethink the narrative of the able-bodied immigrant and reform the current legal and administrative structures that favor able-bodied immigrants at the expense of others.
Disability and Immigration to the North Americas from the 1850s to the 2010s
The 2010 U.S. documentary The Naturalized has shown that the process of immigration, as well as the process of becoming a naturalized US citizen, requires screening in search of the body most-suited for economic production. Some of the immigrants became naturalized through entering the military, which also requires various tests of physical and mental abilities, setting a seemingly meritocratic yet also discriminatory system. The able-bodied person is usually the default standard under the gaze of the immigration officer, most likely due to the long-standing reliance of Asian bodies for substitutes of labor in the United States after the American Civil War (1861-65). As George Lydston, a professor of criminal anthropology active in the early 1900s said more explicitly: Asian immigrants are “much less dangerous” than people with disabilities from Europe, who had become “veritable fungi on the American body social.” Concurring with such an attitude, officials of public health, judges of citizenship processes, and businessmen that used “free” laborers use categories of race in formulating their judgments which assume their respective abilities to produce wealth or profit. Yet such attitudes have also affected the Asian America community’s sense of self of the present day, as I will show in this paper. Disability is a category of analysis along with race, gender, and class. Rather than viewing disability as a medical problem that is independent of the person’s history and culture, I use a social model to examine immigrants who have been identified with disabilities or claim to have disabilities.
In 1838, a bill was introduced in the House to impose a heavy fine on any ship’s master bringing in “an idiot, lunatic, maniac,” or certain other undesirable aliens, but no action was taken. “Mental defect” has been ground for excluding migrants entering the U.S. since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. While the legibility of cases of alien criminals and public charges were debated in the legislature, there was “little vocal concern over the possible entry of alien mental defectives, and their eventual addition to the list of excludables was seemingly by common consent without debate.” In 1891, “idiots and insane” were included. In 1903, the Act expanded to include “All idiots, insane persons, epileptics, and persons who have been insane within five years previous; persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time previously.”
In 1907, there was an addition of imbeciles and feebleminded persons and those who could become a public charge, i.e., those with identifiable physical impairments. In 1914, the U.S. Senate proposed an Amendment to the Bill and included “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority” This Bill was defeated by veto but then reintroduced in the 64th Congress (1915-17). The report claimed that alienists understood the term “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” and was defined as “a congenital defect in the emotional or volitional fields of mental activity which results in the inability to make proper adjustment to the environment.” Doctors also joined in this debate and some produced quite shocking pamphlets regarding the disabled immigrants (see appendix 1 for one produced by doctors in 1913). In the 1917 Act, Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto and included “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority.” In the 1952 Act, the legislature replaced “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority” with a psychopathic personality, to be determined by the medical officer at the port of entry. On Oct 3, 1965, epilepsy was taken off of the restricted list of immigrants. The word “mentally retarded” replaced “feebleminded.” As historian Douglas Baynton wrote,
During these first four decades of federal immigration law, restriction advocates, members of Congress, and Immigration Bureau officials identified defective immigrants as a dire threat to the nation. The menacing image of the defective was the principal catalyst for the rapid expansion of immigration law and the machinery of its enforcement.
In 2019, Donald Trump issued a rule that required “immigration officers reviewing green card applications to assess how much money in public benefits the applicant has used,” identify people who might rely on public assistance once they become a permanent resident and prevent those who do from becoming a permanent resident. Furthermore, in 2019, the immigrants held in ICE jails received poor medical care which resulted in two preventable surgeries, “including an eight-year-old who had to have part of his forehead removed,” and contributed to four deaths.
One key transition in immigrant history was the change of use of the category “Asiatics” to “Asian Americans.” “Asiatics” in pre-Civil War America at times eluded the black and white of enslavement logics, and later Jim Crow laws in creative ways, yet their bodies were subject to intense scrutiny and sexual repression. In 1850, among the rare petitions that preserve the voices of Chinese coolies were descriptions of bodily harm by shipowners. Their pleas cited their inability to perform labor in Cuba and thus suffering crueler treatment by their bosses as a result. Many others’ conditions escaped the records due to their lack of access to such legal platforms or simply due to death under precarious and harsh conditions. In 1865, U.S. official Peter Parker noted that conditions for Chinese laborers in the Americas at times were worse than those of “the middle passage.” In 1862, Congress banned the carriage of “coolies” on American vessels. Under this liberal framework of “free labor,” the immigrant, once predominantly imagined as an Asian male “coolie” in the nineteenth century, who was sometimes indentured and not always free, becomes a willful migrating subject of any class in the twentieth century. The term “Asian American” was coined by a University of California-Los Angeles activist and scholar Yuji Ichioka, with support and inspiration from the popular consciousness that arose from the African American-led Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Today, Asian Americans include those “who are from or whose relatives are from a diverse group of countries: China, Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and many others.” They constitute the group that has the largest divide in socioeconomic statuses.
Historians of immigration today face this dilemma in naming: on the one hand, immigration is normatively good because liberal America can accept differences and diversity. On the other hand, if Chinese coolies indeed were indentured and traded against their medical conditions and denied access to healthcare or the networks to find spouses in the Americas, and then later lynched in California, at what point has the immigrant laborer become truly free-willed subjects? Political legislation in America is also against the historian’s need to recover events in America’s past since that type of “Asiatic” immigrant no longer is categorized by race on paper; or, to save paper and bureaucratic labor, they are often not categorized at all and become “refugees” or “undocumented.” Furthermore, those disadvantaged by the immigration legal regimes often chose “to argue that disability is irrelevant to the question of equality and no justification for discrimination,” thereby leaving fewer precedents for establishing disability rights for immigrants in the common law record. South Asian sailors in the late nineteenth century, also often indentured, jumped ship when at American docks and attempted to hide their origins. Then, liberals lose the debate in rhetoric defense for them because refugees are state dependents and undocumented people carry the tinge of “illegality.” Historians of immigration similarly face issues in defining the status of the immigrant.
Some economists outrightly proposed personal bonded immigrants—who would be sponsored by American individuals and contribute wages to their sponsor—as a solution to the current state of affairs. The liberal progress has come full circle yet the rights of people with disabilities have still be defended and articulated through history or other forms of writing. Scholar Judith Butler has explored such inherent contradictions within the logic of liberalism and definitions of citizenship rights. One of the founders of the Immigration Restriction League and pushers for the literacy test for immigrants, Robert DeCourcy Ward, argued in 1912 that “the New England country towns are full of hopelessly degenerate native [born] Americans who are inferior mentally, morally and physically to the sturdy peasants of Europe” and saw good immigrants as an effective solution. Thus, readers can make the connection between the history of U.S. citizenship standards posed at immigrants and its requirements for intelligence or productive abilities.
Scholar Christine Ferguson has shown that spiritualist writings of the Anglo-Christian tradition discriminated against people with disabilities and aimed to pinpoint the racial characteristics of spirit-encounters through “bioessentialism.” For example, Scottish-American “spirit medium” Daniel Dunglas Home, “purportedly under the spirit guidance of mesmeric-physician John Elliotson,” said during an 1868 seance with prominent members of the British aristocracy:
It’s very wrong to allow persons to marry who are not properly fitted to perpetuate their race [. . .] Angels standing by a very many weddings, where all is rejoicing, weep and mourn – for they see the poor form that must go out and suffer, – the outcast, the criminal, and the murderer.
Aware of social inequity, spiritualist writings advocated “selective human breeding and, occasionally, negative eugenic intervention” as “expedient and compassionate solutions.” Spiritualist writings were not alone in such an attempt to linkability with human worth. Their contemporary critic Henry Maudsley, the psychiatrist and founder of the influential degeneracy theory, argued that spiritualism caused derangement and attracted the soon-to-be insane. Heredity allowed “the lame, the halt, the blind, the warped in intellect” to be attracted to the “dark by-paths of belief.” Yet they were already English-speaking residents of Britain or the U.S. who did not need to face the immigration officer. Scholars note that the “eugenic Atlantic” formed in Britain and the U.S., possibly still affecting immigration debates on both sides of the Atlantic. During the nineteenth century, the genre of realism in the form of anthropology, “newspapers, government inquiry, autopsy reports, and novels” appeared as well for the reading public’s bourgeois interest in migrants and arguably, people outside the able-bodied norm.
The 2017 Basque film Handia (The Giant) portrays this epistemic process masterfully from the 1810s to the 1860s: two brothers from a bare sustenance-level farming household grow estranged when one of them is sent to fight the First Carlist War and the other brother started to grow into a size larger than average. The former then lost his mobility in his hand in the war and held some resentment towards his family for his fate. Yet their fortunes also become enwrapped in the post-Enlightenment drive toward understanding the human difference and scientific anthropology; the “giant” brother is toured around Europe with the help of his crippled brother and a Basque translator. They made more money than farming, but their otherness and subaltern status became pronounced through various interactions with the scholars and rulers, even when they present the “giant” within Spain, their supposed home. Intellectual connections also bring “giants” of different nationalities together, yet such convening does not unsettle the ableist assumptions around their bodies and lives. The “giant’s” fate could not even separate from the burgeoning bourgeois scientific community after his death since his genetic body held a higher value than his value as a living person. Such scientific languages that compare the Handia to their nondisabled norm becomes a precedent for future “supercrips,” which will be explained below. Another example of European notions of disability is quoted below, written by a traveler who arrived at the Ottoman court and interacted with two courtiers:
We delayed a few minutes to converse with two regular mutes; they were boys about 14 years old, very genteel and good-looking, whereby we were completely undeceived in regard of their species, having previously understood that a mute was a kind of animal between a dwarf and a monkey.
From this scientific-sounding description full of condescension, the reader understands that in Ottoman courts people with disabilities could still socialize with visitors. Yet it begs the question of whether such people could have interacted at such an extent with the traveler in the traveler’s home country.
The popularity of the represented and sensationalized reality offered readers a new sense of self and ways of consuming images of the Other. Literature scholar Simon Gikandi said in the context of modern art: “for modernism to appropriate the other and see it as the condition of possibility of modern art, it needed to separate the body of the savage from its aesthetic objects so that the latter could be valued… ." Anglophone modernist literature similarly distances the valuable genius from the threatening conditions in its portrayal of “psychic derangement as immaterial and mental defectiveness as material,” which “suggests that certain mental disabilities are perceived as being materially embodied in the same way as physical disabilities while others are not.” An interesting exception is the body of southern literature written by American women, which focused on bodily deviations from the Southern Belle. Scholar Janet Lyon analyzed writer Virginia Woolf’s modernist sensibility and privilege effect on public governance as well:
If mental deficiency, however ill-defined, becomes the provisional ground for what is in effect a liberal state of exception, where institutions like the asylum system take up the biopolitical management of defective “life,” then what would it mean to encounter those cancelled citizens, whose public appearance or disappearance has been constitutively tethered to national health?
In this sense, immigrants and denied migrants (“canceled citizens”) at U.S. borders certainly suffered and continue to suffer from both “immaterial” and “material” issues, yet the positivist historical records can only record those definitions of disability available to the doctors-inspectors on-site at that given day of inspection, which is often the disability that affects one’s ability to labor physically. Significantly, many of the American Sign Language community do not consider themselves disabled. Scholars have noted that special education classrooms in U.S. “public schools are overpopulated by African American/Latino students, thereby acknowledging that race and disability coexist as uneasy bedfellows in educational contexts.” Such school placements usually reflect the public schools’ mitigate the effects of homelessness and other forms of economic inequality on the families. It is interesting to note that disability once meant financial hardship as well, but that meaning is now obsolete.
The (white) male genius, on the other hand, has been given more leeway in terms of exhibiting his derangements, which also possibly benefited white (-passing) male immigrants with similar identifiable features. Celebrating or defining the passage of the American Disability Act of 1990 as progress often presumes that all Americans have access to some form of governable, standardized health care and that there is a stable definition of who is “American.”
Philosopher Michel Foucault predicted the rise of the state that regulates productivity in analyses of medical systems, language, psychiatry and “sexual instinct” in History of Sexuality Volume 1. Scholar Nikolas Rose has carried on this project of biopower and discovered the emergence of “biological citizenship” in his study of the Human Genome Project, noting the potential of connecting future biological generations of people carrying “defective” genes with their citizenship status. In the American context, senator Elizabeth Warren’s “Native American” DNA report serves to consolidate such a positivist understanding of humanity and citizenship among the general public, and many Native Americans have expressed their disagreement in approach. Since 2017, American political leadership outrightly declared its elitist preference in the “merit-based” selection of incoming immigrants. Six months later in the same year, U.S. President Donald Trump canceled the protection undocumented people had under President Barrack Obama. Recently, Trump expressed intentions to create an executive order announcing Judaism as a nationality. Hence, most differences of intersectionality in the eyes of America’s white nationalists, are reduced to a single identity, such as the non-American nationality. Such sentiments and ideas existed prior to Trump’s presidency by white nationalists, many of whom are recipients of government healthcare programs such as Medicaid. Elitist and popularly-defined “successful” immigrants also like to make narratives about “how-I-made-it,” contrasting their previous selves of coming to the U.S. without much liquidity with their present “successful” selves. The often-used phrase towards unwanted immigrants, whether their status of being an immigrant is perceived or actual, by white nationalists in the U.S. that they should or can “go back where you came from” comes to mind. This phrase was most recently used by Trump against the Democratic Party’s congresswomen. With a nuanced understanding of disability and the knowledge of the recent incident in which the U.S. deported a diabetic man, who eventually died in the place where he came from, one can see that mobility and a certain level of health of the immigrant are the underlying assumptions in this strong claim. This humble project wishes to explore how immigrants navigated their disability and subjectivity from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.
Review of Scholarship on Disability and Immigration
In some indigenous cultures of North America, disabled people were simply viewed as different rather than damaged. In tribal ceremonies, an “individual’s harmony can be restored and the individual is seen as cured—regardless of the physical manifestations or impairments that are still present.” Soon, such attitudes shifted with the arrival of settler colonialism and freak shows. The connection between eugenic laws, forced sterilization and discrimination against people with mental or physical disabilities in America has been established by historians such as Martin S. Pernick. Public space in America has been restricted to not only certain races, such as the banning of Chinese peddlers in San Francisco to the segregation of “coloreds” from “white facilities,” but also to “ugly” people according to the book The Ugly Laws. Historian Douglas Baynton has shown how industrialization and economic insecurity in the 1910s to 1930s America popularized the idea that peoples with a disability as useless and dependent. He along with other scholars have also argued that sexuality in America has been shaped by immigration in which their perceptions of abnormality excluded those of certain gender identities. While the U.S. law did not issue bans of people with disabilities as explicitly as the ban on Chinese immigrants, American ports targeted individual peoples with disabilities quite efficiently through visual identification and on-site medical examinations. Scholar Penny L. Richards has studied points of entry in the American immigration system and created a map of disability. Scholars Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have proposed the theory “ablenationalism,” based on the American context, they observe that the naturalized qualification of citizenship often “[treats] people with disabilities as an exception” and “valorizes able-bodied norms.” In Chris Bell’s research on HIV patients, he observed that race is a crucial factor in determining their disability status. Scholar Susan Craddock studied the ways English records of the nineteenth century in America recorded and understood the ships that arrived at Angel Island from China, Chinese bodies, and the buildings and streets of Chinatown were carrying sources of tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox. Asian American studies scholar Nayan Shah has also studied the stigmatized Chinese bodies and tenements under the gaze of the San Francisco (white) legal regime. Asian American and disability activist, Mia Mingus, has also written about the effects of social media for people to desire a certain type of body that excludes people with disabilities, which I interpret as a continuation of the aftermath of the Ugly Laws.
Notably, the oral history book of the disability rights movement What We Have Done does not have a section on the immigrants’ or indigenous peoples’ experiences. Fortunately, interviews such as Circle of Life and ongoing podcasts such as the Disability Visibility Project can address this gap. For example, a Lakota elder said on the different person “challenged and energized” the community. He continued to state that “Neither the ordinary person nor the heyoka person has a better view of reality; what each sees is universally accepted as fully real by everyone in the nation.”
Legal and gender studies scholar Hentyle Yapp has argued in his research on disability in America and China for understanding “disability as the exception,” which is less about “achieving multicultural recognition and more about tracking how the category has historically functioned in relation to others.” He observed that the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) of 1990 viewed disability as an exception to a societal norm, which is contradictory since as students know, the norm has always been shifting in American history. Specifically, the ADA prohibited “discrimination based on ability status and mandated reasonable accommodations in education, employment, public facilities, and commercial services for disabled people.” Yet “reasonable accommodation” now is highly contested in American politics. Yapp extends the concept of disability as “a biopolitical force” beyond the American context and argues that one should examine both the inclusion and exclusion of disabled people and how their public presence in society is used against groups of difference. The framework provided by American studies scholar Aihwa Ong is also important to understand who is an exceptional immigrant in America. Ong’s book The Buddha is Hiding was a seminal work in understanding the exceptionality of Southeast Asian communities in America. Through reading the extent to which they received federal aid in their new lives, I have inferred that many Southeast Asians’ entry in the 1970s was based on, to some extent, the political backlash against the Vietnamese War burden and the American state’s view of itself as a paternal protector of non-Communist immigrants.
Yet as recent deportations of Southeast Asian and Iraqi American individuals have shown, such “gifts” from the American state can become conditional. In addition to Yapp’s comparative intervention, historians of trauma studies have also acknowledged the critical relevance of researching on disability. In contrast to the more recent wars, the aftermath of the Korean War on the American social fabric and immigration has yet to be thoroughly studied, but fictional works such as The Surrendered, which is about disabled vets and neurodivergent Korean American characters, have inspired fruitful discussions on disability among post-war immigrants and whiteness. Scholar Jina Kim has also observed how India and the U.S. converge in terms of their medical discourses that “envisage disability as an individualized defect, a crippling abnormality that treatment must eradicate” in the aftermath of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Similarly, immigrants also internalize that their conditions are individualized circumstances rather than a result of an ableist legal regime.
Culturally, Asian Americans often have to prove first their language and fluency in pop culture. An example is modern-day media include David Chang of the cooking cultural show Ugly Delicious, comedian Hasan Minhaj in the weekly show Patriot Act, and countless Asian American academics who do not speak on their debilitating conditions. Some academics have realized the damaging effects of the “super-crip,” the disabled person who functions or even exceeds the average person; Joseph Shapiro defines the supercrip as an “inspirational disabled person […] glorified [… and] lavishly lauded in the press and on television.” In this sense, the famed writer Helen Keller, Jane Eyre of Jane Eyre, and the forerunner of China’s legal recognition of peoples with disabilities, Deng Pufang, are all super-crips. They are inspirational but not necessarily representative. Scholar Eli Clare expounds on the specific implications of such neoliberal representations:
Supercrip stories never focus on the conditions that make it so difficult for people with Down [Syndrome]’s to have romantic partners, for blind people to have adventures, for disabled kids to play sports. I don’t mean medical conditions. I mean material, social, legal conditions. I mean lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services. I mean stereotypes and attitudes. I mean oppression.
Michael Bérubé concurred with this quote in his interview with Frederick Luis Aldama. He noted that there have been signs of progress in using better language and social practices for people who used to be labeled as “mental retardation” in law and policy. Yet people with such disabilities still need means for livelihood and destigmatization. Mainstream Asian Americans “who have made it” does not have similar receptibility to such a formulation and continue to extol the recipes for exceptional success among minorities; notably, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom (2011), law professor Amy Chua. Hasan Minaj extensively joked about his identity as a model minority and many Asian parents’ obsession for “merit-based” admissions and, at times, even against affirmative action. He also took the SAT test again on one episode to prove his lack of test-taking abilities. Yet he does not unpack the ableist notions behind such expectations the American state poses on certain “model minorities.” Simply making fun of such tests is not enough for more accommodation in such processes, though some universities have made the move to stop requiring such tests. The movement within Veteran communities also use the similar logic and linear time of immigration: they paid their dues in the past, and thus now the state should take care of their disabilities, rather than ask based on their human rights.
Arab American communities, which the Iraqi American Jimmy Aldaoud belonged, suffer in silence at times due to cultural specificities within the community as well as external xenophobia that targets their community of late. Two notable exceptions are the comedian Maysoon Zayid and the television show Ramy. The former is an outspoken Muslim female comedian, who argued that accessibility means more than wheelchair ramps. The latter show’s first season explored the relative privilege of the able-bodied main character Ramy through his friendship with Steve, Ramy’s white friend with muscular dystrophy. Even as Ramy suffered from the deluge of attacks on his religious and ethnic identity from the society at large, he realized his abilities to date and go out while hanging out with Steve and Steve’s romantic interest. Such are the few exceptions among minority cultural productions that discuss the shared experiences of marginalization in terms of race and disability.
The Way Forward
In conclusion, this paper has shown how immigration laws in America were keenly interested in promoting the able-bodied immigrant for labor and cultural reasons. Such a culture still exists today among Asian American communities. Given that the scripts for Asian American women are very limited, the public largely perceives that she has to either have to be smart or attractive to be granted by the legal regime to stay in the U.S. The discourse against “prostitution” of Chinatown to the modern-day vitriol against “mail-order brides” from Asia largely overexaggerates their dependencies on the mainstream society and overlook the fact that these bodies are more or less able-bodies available for consumption and/or social reproduction. The Naturalized also shows that marriage to American citizens can end the liminality for soon-to-be-naturalized women in the U.S.; yet their struggles subsequently become personal narratives in the documentary rather than examples of gender inequality. Unlike India, the U.S. has yet to adopt a more proactive approach in decriminalizing sex work, which also involves how one defines “work” and who counts as a “productive” being.
Now that the U.S. Senate has voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment, perhaps there will be more calls to end the ableist policies he has promoted under his administration, as well as accountability for ICE’s lack of medical treatments for people with special needs. Lest the human genome project becomes a eugenic project, the public should also be aware of the connections between medicine, privacy, and human value vis-à-vis the over-extensive power of the study of genetics. Destigmatization of people with disabilities also involves more federal funds for re-including people with disabilities into the American social fabric and reexamining the immigration standards. The Native American community’s activism for visibility is one good precedent for people with disabilities: while the mainstream public may not accept indigeneity or people with disabilities as inherently valuable, they continue to fight for their survival. More cultural narratives that highlight the humanity of people with disabilities, beyond just their ability to cope and use public facilities, can also garner a less ableist lens of their existence.
Appendices
Appendix 1: “Putting Our Immigrants through the Sieve at Ellis Island: Government Stands as ‘Doctor of Eugenics’ at Portals of Nation.” Portland Oregonian, September 28, 1913.
© Copyright, Oregonian Publishing Co.
Images shows Uncle Sam in front of the Statue of Liberty (his hat blocks the statues’ face) while looking down at his hand which is holding a girl with a bag that he will examine and most likely reject from entering the United States.
Appendix 2: Steve and Ramy in the show Ramy. A man with muscular dystrophy sits in a wheelchair rolling down an open street in the greater New York area while another man with a cap stands on top of the back of the wheelchair with arms extended.
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