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From Fictive Ability to National Identity: Disability, Medical Inspection, and Public HealthRegulations on Ellis IslandAuthor(s): Roxana GaluscaSource: Cultural Critique, No. 72 (Spring, 2009), pp. 137-163Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619827 .
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY DISABILITY, MEDICAL INSPECTION, AND PUBLIC HEALTH
REGULATIONS ON ELLIS ISLAND
Roxana Galusca
INTRODUCTION
Located outside New York City, Ellis Island served as the most suc
cessful immigration processing station for six decades, until 1954, when
the federal government closed it for good.1 History keeps ambivalent
records of the place, which, in keeping with incomers' experiences, is remembered as the "Isle of Hope," the "Isle of Tears," and the
"Heartbreak Island" (Kraut, 53). For aspirers to the American dream, the immigration station signified the fear of disease and expulsion. For American citizens, however, Ellis Island confirmed the vitality and attraction worldwide of the American dream, even as it secured
national borders against unwanted incomers. In its dual role as na
tional symbol and immigration buffer, Ellis Island is reminiscent of
the eternal antagonism in U.S. history between the national celebration
of immigrant origins and the desire to exclude certain immigration
groups. Whichever way the historical balance might tilt, it is certain
that Ellis Island, as the first and largest processing station in the United
States, cleared the way for the later inspection site of Angel Island,
opened in 1910 for Chinese immigrants, and for the notorious El Paso
border delousing practices. Ellis Island marks one more sequel in the
long chain of U.S. integrationist policies, not unlike other state pro
jects, all characterized by the attempt to define and delineate the form
and content of the ideal nation.
The nation-state has long been theorized in terms of language,
gender, race, and ethnicity, but there has been scarce attention given to the ideals of ablebodiedness underlying nationalist projects. Simi
larly, immigration, itself the focus of nationalist policies, has benefited
Cultural Critique 72?Spring 2009?Copyright 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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138 | ROXANA GALUSCA
only recently from an intersectional approach inclusive of disability.
Any nation, its imaginary community notwithstanding, relies for its
ideological survival not only on linguistic, gender, and racial unifor
mity but also on entrenched ideals of health and ability. Despite the
close ties between ableism and nationalist policies and despite the
fact that foreignness has been constantly medicalized as a contagious threat to the nation-state, only a handful of scholars interrogate from
a disability studies perspective the nation-state's demand for flaw
less bodies and minds. The present study on Ellis Island is an attempt to situate theories of nationality within a framework informed by dis
ability studies. Ellis Island represents, I contend, an institutionalized
discourse that promotes the ideal nation-state at the expense of the
disabled and diseased alien bodies on the island.
According to Etienne Balibar, the nation is an ideology that sur
vives through invented narratives of stable territories, generational
continuity, and "Active ethnicity." Balibar provides an insightful ac
count of national ideologies, but he overlooks the most pervasive
ideological fabrication underlying any nation-state?the ideology of
ablebodiedness. From a disability studies perspective, Ellis Island
functions to remap the ideological underpinnings of the American
nation according to ideals of health and ability. Moreover, an inter
sectional analysis of the immigration policies enforced on Ellis Island
with an emphasis on disability would further complicate the Balibar
ian theory of the nation-state. My goal here, following Balibar's notion
of fictive ethnicity, is to propose the idea oi fictive ability, a concept de
signed to examine the role that ableist values play in immigration poli cies generally and in Ellis Island immigration regulations particularly.
Fictive ability as an ideology contains human bodies within a pub lic health system, confining individuals to a coherent narrative of able
bodiedness that undergirds national communities. Like other social
identities, ability is a sociohistorical construction that functions to
differentiate, marginalize, and control individuals under the aegis of
the nation's well-being. In public parlance, however, ability is con
ceived as anything but a social fabrication. Current scholarship stresses
the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality, but theoretical
efforts to demystify the ideology of ablebodiedness, though growing in number, have not yet gained wide acceptance in academic discourse.
Fictive ability, then, represents an effective state ideology that not only
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 139
sets up its own hierarchical system but also lends support to oppres sive structures of class, gender, race, and sexuality.
To this point, both immigration and public health scholars have
addressed rather successfully the multilayered interactions between
public health institutions and immigrant groups. In particular, schol
ars in immigration studies constantly cross disciplinary boundaries
in the attempt to understand the unstable relationships between im
migrants and state apparatuses. Eithne Luibheid, among many oth
ers, develops a Foucauldian take on power relations in an impressive examination of the medical constructions of sexuality at the borders.
Her Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border traces the history of public health regulations at U.S. ports of entry, with a focus on the
medical representation and construction of female identities as pros
titutes, lesbians, or dependents. A different but equally engaging ap
proach to the medical regulation of immigration underlines Amy Fairchild's Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the
Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force. Fairchild explores produc tions of immigrant identities at main U.S. ports of entry with an eye to the imbrications of medicine and industrial capitalism. Public health
scholars during the last decade have also brought their own contri
bution to the increasing body of theoretical work on immigration by
tackling public health policies that target racialized groups both inside
and outside U.S. territory.2 In general, recent critical approaches to
national ideologies contain insightful criticisms of the medical estab
lishment and explore immigrant identities at the intersection of med
ical discourses and the geopolitics of the nation-state.
More often than not, however, these theoretical analyses fall short
of critical insights advanced by disability studies because they con
tinue to rely on medical accounts of disease and disability. In this
sense, Howard Market's and Alexandra Minna Stern's analysis of dis
ease patterns at U.S. ports of entry pursues the usual model followed
by public health studies. The two scholars offer a thorough history of
public health regulations in border spaces, but their study lacks none
theless a critical engagement with social constructions of disease and
disability. Despite the initial stated goal of the essay to discuss how
regional differences inflect medical perceptions of immigrants, Markel and Stern leave untouched strictly biological assumptions behind dis ease epidemiology, affirming time and again that high exclusions of
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140 | ROXANA GALUSCA
immigrants resulted from inspectors' overzealous use of medical sci ence and from the development of new diagnostic technologies rather
than from discriminatory approaches to racial and gendered groups and the intolerance of disability inherent to that science. Similarly, few immigration scholars articulate the importance of examining his
torical constructions of disability for an accurate understanding of
U.S. immigration restrictions, and fewer still acknowledge that pub lic health discourses preserve deep-rooted medical prejudices against disabled bodies. The exclusion of physically and cognitively impaired
immigrants at the borders owes much of its success to longstanding renditions of disability as pollution and corruption endangering the
nation-state. At the same time, the magical power that ablebodiedness
has always had on society at large functions as a historical precondi tion for discrimination against racialized subjects. That the specter of
disability already operated as an exclusionary rationale within national
discourses, before the enactment of public health legislation at ports of entry, is of no little significance: the stigma associated with dis
abled bodies facilitates the connection between racialized groups and
the fear of "imperfect" bodies and minds.
Disability scholars and activists reject the medical model of dis
ability because it locates disability in the body and places the respon
sibility for the impairment on the disabled subject. By contrast, they favor a "social model" that sheds light on the multiple ways in which
society produces an environment that disables bodies and nurtures
prejudices against the diseased and the disabled.3 In disability stud
ies, the interrogating gaze falls away from the disabled body and rests
on the social body. For example, disability scholar Henri-Jacques Stiker
proposes a social model of disability that highlights contemporary societal imperatives for normativity and sameness. Society's desire
to diagnose, isolate, and rehabilitate the diseased body, Stiker con
tends, arises from the state-sanctioned urge to morph difference into
identicalness. The insistence by disability studies theorists on the social
model could prove useful for historical approaches to public health,
since awareness of the use of medicine to isolate diseased subjects in
order to "fix" them in the name of public well-being and social ad
vancement demystifies ableist ideologies that enforce concepts of dis
ease to the exclusion of minority groups.
Douglas Baynton, among the few scholars to give centrality to
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 141
disability studies in national discriminatory policies, recognizes the
use of disability as "a justification for inequality" ("Disability," 33). The
denial of citizenship to immigrants and of civil rights to U.S. minori
ties, he argues, has always been enforced by appeals to normative
concepts of health and ability. Baynton argues convincingly that the
stigma of disability looms ominously over the national body as an
invisible marker fueling racial and gender inequity. The concept of fic
tive ability proposed here takes its inspiration from critical interroga tions of public health policies, but especially from the field of disability studies with its insistence on the political significance of disability.
More than a marker of inequality, fictive ability represents a self
contained ideology that supports the larger ideological apparatus of
the nation-state, configuring individual identities to its purposes and
embedding in public conceptions of class, gender, race, and sexuality the unseen and unspoken signifiers of disability.
THEORIZING NATIONALITY THROUGH ABLEBODIEDNESS
Conceiving nation as ideology, Balibar argues compellingly that any nation depends for its coherence on a history that "is always already
presented to us in the form of a narrative" (86). National myths and
historical events, envisioned as foundational to the development of
any nation, create the illusion of generational continuity in a territory believed to be stable and marked by a specific "manifest destiny."
Project and destiny are, according to Balibar, "the two symmetrical
figures of the illusion of national identity" (86). In turn, the imagi nary national identity originates in and continuously relies on the
foundation of the national-social state, that is, the various institutions
that intervene in "the very reproduction of the economy and particu
larly in the formation of individuals, in family structures, the structures
of public health and, more generally in the whole space of 'private life'" (92). More crucial, the ideal nation remains an unconvincing, abstract concept unless it coexists with what Balibar calls "fictive eth
nicity." For Balibar, fictive ethnicity is a necessary "fabrication" that
constructs the abstract idealization of the nation-state around its concrete populations, rendered as sharing common historical and lin
guistic roots:
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142 | ROXANA GALUSCA
It is Active ethnicity which makes it possible for the expression of a pre
existing unity to be seen in the state, and continually to measure the state
against "historic mission" in the service of the nation and, as a conse
quence, to idealize politics. By constituting the people as a Actively eth
nic unity against the backgrounds of a universalistic representation which
attributes to each individual one?and only one?ethnic identity and
which thus divides up the whole of humanity between different ethnic
groups corresponding potentially to so many nations, national ideology does much more than justify the strategies employed by the state to con trol populations. It inscribes their demands in advance in a sense of be
longing in the double sense of the term?both what it is that makes one
belong to oneself and also what makes one belong to other fellow human
beings. (96)
As Balibar rightly contends, any successful national narrative must
strive to corral divergent subjectivities and experiences within a coher
ent and unique frame of reference. The teleological patterns that mark
national histories, from a purportedly inevitable past to an organically
designed future, give cohesiveness to conflicting and divergent national
stories. Given the efficient ideologies that support the nation-state, the
hiatus between appearance and reality, crucial to the viability of any national ideology, emerges with clarity only when we examine closely the social presuppositions that legitimate discriminatory actions and
buttress national narratives of homogeneity. Struggles for purity and
wholesomeness, I contend, have played a similar demystifying role in
the politics of the nation-state, both with respect to the national body and its citizens. Ableist assumptions, left unquestioned, permit numer
ous discriminatory attitudes against racialized subjects, keeping yet one more national myth intact from critique.
Immigrant groups in U.S. history have been constantly barred
from entering the country based on their assumed contagion and
disease. In this case, Active ability functions to conceal and mobilize
racism in the service of national security and prosperity. The fiction
of ablebodiedness, shaping the history of the U.S. nation-state, makes
possible the coexistence of contradictory messages that celebrate the
United States as a nation of immigrants at the same time that the
state, through its institutions, practices highly exclusionary politics. The public desire for able bodies and minds resolves the conflict be
tween capitalism's need for cheap labor and the state's strict border
control by deploying fears of biological inferiority and unfitness. Most
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 143
importantly, official emphases on healthy and able bodies appeal to citizens individually and make them feel personally and directly
endangered by the possible entry of "contagious," "maimed," and
"intellectually inferior" incomers. Thus, fictive ability conceals the
ideological breaks in the national story and plays a foundational role
in what Balibar calls "the illusion of national identity" (86). The pub lic health structures that form the Balibarian national-social state are
not tangential to immigration restriction and national ideologies but
necessary to the fabrication of the nation, as instantiated by the works
of eugenicists at the beginning of the twentieth century. The medical
discourses that produce sanitized spaces and medical subjects at U.S.
ports of entry reveal the ideological power of ablebodiedness.
The public health policies promoted on Ellis Island speak volumes
about the ableist ideologies supporting the fiction of nationality. In
1891, the American federal government, weary of immigrant crowds
entering the country, took the reins of the immigration administration
and founded the Bureau of Immigration (Unrau, 3). The event marked
the passing of the Immigration Act of 1891 mandating the transference
of the usually state-administered immigration issues to federal author
ity. This change in organization segued long debates over immigration and its menace to a healthy nation. Approximately a decade earlier,
speakers at the conference of superintendents of institutions for the
"feebleminded" had insisted unanimously on the urgency to restrict
"the sewage of vice and crime and physical weakness" of Europe and
Asia (Kraut, 50). In this anti-immigration climate, the fledgling Bureau
of Immigration joined forces with the Public Health Service in order
to stop at the borders any diseased and disabled immigrants, and thus to ensure the nation's protection. On March 3, 1891, the bureau, in
keeping with its strong nationalist values, proclaimed physical med
ical inspections compulsory for immigrants entering the United States.
That same year, the federal government signed into existence Ellis
Island, the first processing station for immigrants in the United States.
The Bureau of Immigration and the Public Health Service func
tioned to pathologize alien bodies, on the one hand, and to regularize the nation-body, on the other hand. Through immigration bills and
regulations, the two public institutions helped to create the legal milieu within which Ellis Island operated. In this institutionalized form, Ellis
Island reinforced the illusion of racial purity and ablebodiedness of
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144 | ROXANA GALUSCA
the nation, redefining the manifest destiny of the nation around issues
of health and ability. By drawing an imaginary borderline between
the ablebodied and the disabled, the racially marked bodies and their
unmarked counterparts, the immigration regulations on the island
reinscribed health and ablebodiedness as national characteristics.
Thus, the American nation came to be defined according to medical
norms of ability. In its embodiment of the stigma of disease and race,
Ellis Island functioned as an indispensable national "laboratory" that
reinvented the nation-state as a scientific project, while racializing bod
ies as metonymic extensions of contamination. Race, pathology, and
nationalism intersected and created the backdrop for the Ellis Island
processing station. The racialized, disabled, and diseased body func
tioned as the scapegoat, a political spectacle that helped to consolidate, at the opposite pole, the sanitized, healthy nation-state.
When one supplements the Balibarian paradigm with a theoreti
cal disability framework, nationality emerges first and foremost as a
scientific venture whose very ideology is deeply rooted in ableism.
Indeed, if Activity is what characterizes any national ideology, then
the fiction of ability shapes scientifically the way race and ethnicity will be perceived in a given nation-state. The immigration policies that
gave body to Ellis Island originated in and supported allegedly objec tive scientific knowledge about race.4 To be sure, Ellis Island's des
tiny was closely connected with the emerging eugenic practices in the
United States. The medical insistence on healthy bodies and minds as
a prerequisite for entering the United States coexisted with the eugenic
advocacy for racial superiority. In 1909, the British statistician Sir Francis Galton defined eugenics
as "the science that deals with all influences that improve the inborn
qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost
advantage" (Stern, 11). Both Ellis Island's medical inspections and the
eugenic efforts to eliminate the "unfit" replicated well-known scien
tific beliefs in the biological inferiority of some racial groups. At the
time, eugenic adherents and physicians, some of whom also served
as inspectors on Ellis Island, formulated their racial theories around
the two evolutionary trends of neo-Lamarckism, with its belief in the
optimal influence of the environment on inferior races, and the more
favored biologically deterministic Mendelianism. Although endorsing different evolutionary principles, Mendelian supporters differed little
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 145
in practice from neo-Lamarckists because both factions relied on the
principle that national populations possess inheritable essences. Most
significantly, proponents of both evolutionary trends foregrounded race in debates about culture and nationality. Vacillating between the
two, popular and scientific attitudes implemented a racial hierarchy that "placed whites and Europeans at the apex of civilization, blacks
and Africans on the bottom rungs, and nearly everyone else in the
suboptimal middle position of hybridity and mongrelization" (Stern,
13). A further racial caste system, very influential on Ellis Island,
depicted southeastern Europeans as inferior and as a threat to the
northwestern European stock. Not surprisingly, a few years after the
opening of the processing station, William Williams, commissioner of
immigration at Ellis Island, resorted to ableist and racial arguments to support his selective immigration policy, stressing deep concerns
about the incoming crowds of southeastern Europeans who contained
"many undesirable and unintelligent people" (Shapiro, 101). The eugenic backlash against the new immigrants culminated in
the 1920s when Harry H. Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugen ics Record Office, became the Expert Eugenical Agent of the Commit
tee on Immigration and Naturalization. In keeping with solid eugenic
principles, Laughlin believed in an American race, narrowly defined
as the descendants of the English settlers, and argued that, to pre serve the purity of the American stock, the U.S. government had to
restrict immigration to northwestern Europeans, and even then only to those who "are carefully inspected and selected" (King, 135). In
1928, Laughlin closely examined a survey of state and federal asylums and prisons. His conclusion that southeastern European immigrants outnumbered older stock immigrants in state regulatory institutions dovetailed nicely with his own theories about racial degeneracy.
Laughlin and other eugenicists argued that biology should outweigh any other criteria for immigrant selection, and designed a set of desir
able traits in the ideal immigrant, such as industry, truth loving, in
ventiveness, social instinct, and responsibility (187). Laughlin also used
his political charisma and eugenic research to push the passage of the
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of1924, which specified a 2 percent quota per nation based on the 1890 census. This immigration act, also known as the National Origins Act, openly favored northwestern Europeans.
With this legislation, which curtailed significantly immigration from
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146 | ROXANA GALUSCA
southeastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, the eugenic dream of a pure
Anglo-Saxon race came to fulfillment.
The restoration of an American national identity based on the
Anglo-Saxon heritage underlined the medical drive behind immigra tion regulations at this time. In the same way that eugenics promised a nation of high quality, the designers of Ellis Island pursued seri
ously the betterment of immigration and, consequently, the health of the nation. As a nationalist laboratory, Ellis Island helped to imagine, at the other end of the spectrum, a unified and healthy nation, exist
ing both as an imaginary site and a concrete, geographically bordered
territory. The immigration processing station emerged as a protective and comforting point of reference as well as a constant affirmation of
nationhood in the face of the immigrant influx.
ELLIS ISLAND AND THE URGE TOWARD FICTIVE ABILITY
The first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island, in keeping with the
logic of nation fabrication, set off the celebration par excellence of the
nation-state and of its institutions. Annie Moore, the fifteen-year-old
"rosy-cheeked Irish girl," remains in history as the first immigrant to
pass on January 1,1892 through Ellis Island (Kraut, 52). The New York
Times published a laudatory editorial on the event and applauded the
receiving station as a great contribution to national security. As the
author of the editorial proudly related, the immigration commissioner
of the New York port, John B. Weber, "made a short address of con
gratulation and welcome" and had Annie's name written in the reg
istry book ("Landed"; Kraut, 53). After a quick medical inspection, the Irish girl received a ten-dollar gold piece and was allowed to land.
Such an inaugural occasion, comforting in its guarantee of national
protection, represents the public articulation of the national imagi
nary. The recorded landing signifies an instance of writing the nation, an enactment of the story of the privileged against the story of the
immigrant other. The golden American coin, "the first United States
coin she [Annie] had ever seen and the largest sum of money she had
ever possessed," as the author of the editorial proudly assumes, became
the national signifier of Americanness and an official reinforcement
of the figurative and concrete borders that the immigrant other was
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY |
allowed to cross. Concurrently, the celebratory public discourse of the
"crossing immigrant" tacitly coerced Annie into pledging loyalty to
the new embracing nation. Since crossing the border meant renounc
ing her Irish nationality and becoming assimilated into the American
society, Annie Moore embodied the prototype of the "good immi
grant," an ironic message given the national diatribe against Irish
immigrants only a few decades earlier. The celebratory event rein
forced above all the solidity of the American national identity and
once more underscored the fictive ability of the nation, since innuen
does about ability and health ran throughout the gazetteer's account.
Annie Moore entered U.S. immigration history as the first Ellis Island
immigrant who met the medical standards for citizenship. Annie's festive landing runs counter to the treatment of millions
of immigrants arriving after her ocean crossing. In addition to its able
ist premise, her reception on Ellis Island bolstered a coherent public discourse on white heterosexual classless citizenship. The abstracted
values and norms presumably met by a successful immigrant like
Annie Moore forged an ad hoc citizenship, which promised future
full inclusion into the nation-state and to which only certain Ellis Island
immigrants could aspire. The public endorsement of her successful
landing and the acknowledgment of her potential belonging to the
nation-state erased from history the destinies of those incomers who
failed the test of the "good immigrant" and ended up on the medical
inspectors' charts of excludable disabilities.
At the time of Annie's arrival, medical science constituted the
official belief system used to interpret immigrant individualities and
to cast multiple social identities according to a monolithic scientific
taxonomy of disease and disability, despite the fact that popular racial
assumptions inflected inspectors' medical knowledge to a large extent.
Widespread prejudices against women, the poor, or the "sexually sus
picious" offered inspectors an initial simplified schema of approach to and perception of the immigrant masses. For instance, deeply en
trenched class values caused inspectors to distinguish from the very
beginning immigrants who traveled first and second class from steer
age passengers. Once the steamships carrying immigrants anchored
in the New York port, the United States Marine Hospital Service physi cian climbed aboard and inspected the first- and second-class passen gers. Under the assumption that those who traveled in superior-class
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148 | ROXANA GALUSCA
accommodations were healthy and implicitly welcome on American
soil, their medical inspection and the subsequent interrogation were
speedy. The situation changed, however, when it came to the inspection
of steerage and third-class passengers. Obviously poorer and pur
portedly less educated than their high-class co-travelers, they were
taken by boats to Ellis Island for a stricter inspection (Kraut, 53). This
internal class hierarchy acted as a sedative for the ongoing public rants against the infiltration of the United States by immigrants of
lower status and education. The belief that a person's social status
and health were closely interrelated led to the conflation of social
constructions of health, race, and class, so that an immigrant's racial
and class provenience carried automatic medical implications. The
common assumption was, as Ellis Island Commissioner William Wil
liams put it in 1909, that "poor immigration" tended "to deter good
immigrants from the country" (Unrau, 55). Williams's rhetoric played on the multiple connotations associated in the era with the concept of
"poor immigration." Health, economic status, and race were central
to anti-immigration discourses that labeled immigration as either
"poor" or "good," with the evident implication that immigrants of
poor health, poor economic status, and poor racial stock belonged outside a system that valued only the best racial and social types.
The segregation of immigrants into high-class?and thus easily assimilable?and lower-class nonassimilable masses replicated an
almost aristocratic discourse, incompatible with the American demo
cratic system expected by the immigrants. Significantly, this elitist
message was subtly interwoven in the birth certificate of Ellis Island.
When the Immigration Act of 1891 transferred the state administration
of immigration to the federal government, the underlying assump tion was that, as the legislative act phrased it, "a sovereign nation must
be able to exercise control over its borders. That's what it means to
be a sovereign entity" (Luibheid, xviii). Such pronouncements, rather
numerous at the time, re-imagined the nation as an extension of the
state's control and sovereignty. They represented the nation as a pro tected and protective space, while interpellating the population within
its borders as citizens. The external control over borders also presup
posed the state's authority over its citizens. Borderline places such as
Ellis Island functioned as "a projection and protection of an internal
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 149
collective personality/' corroborating the creation of a national space to which one belonged and which needed to be protected to satisfy the population's constant desire for security (Balibar, 95).
Even when coming from ports where infectious diseases prevailed, the first- and second-class passengers were allowed to land without a
thorough inspection (Unrau, 34). Instead, the steerage travelers, arriv
ing from ports known for contagious outbreaks, were not permitted ashore unless there was proof that they had been detained at the de
parture port for at least five days "under medical observation in espe
cially designated barracks or houses set apart for their exclusive use,
and that their clothing, baggage, and personal effects [had] been dis
infected before being placed on board" (34). Even though the port of
departure had been cleared of any suspicion of epidemics, steerage travelers suffered no less scrutiny. After the ship anchored in the port and the immigrants were taken by boat to the island, each immigrant was given a numbered tag that matched the passenger's name and
number in the ship's record (Pegler-Gordon, 198). Once tagged, the
immigrants joined the inspection line, where they were examined by a physician and declared healthy and fit, or "sick and disabled," in
which case they were either detained for further investigations or de
ported (Unrau, 37-38). As the increasing number of immigrants became a source of anxiety for the government, medical inspections were pro
longed to include X-rays and IQ tests. In general, each immigrant
passed through a battery of medical examinations and questionnaires in order to be declared "without a doubt entitled to land" (Shapiro, 109). On average, 2 percent of immigrants were deported, while 20
percent were detained for days, weeks, or even months for more in
vestigations (109). Following the medical inspection, those fortunate
enough to escape further medical tests moved to another line for an
interview with an immigration inspector.5 The normative medical code that underwrote Annie Moore's and
other immigrants' inclusion into the American nation-state found
expression in the classes of deportable contagions and impairments
approved by Ellis Island physicians. The pathological hierarchy set in
place by medical officials defined immigrant identities in reference to
three main classes of disease. In Class A, the most unacceptable and
dangerous contagions, were the "loathsome diseases" of favus, syphilis, gonorrhea, and leprosy, on a par with the conditions displayed by
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"insane persons," "the ignorant representatives of emotional races," and the "idiots" or "mental defectives." Class B covered aliens not in
cluded in Class A, but who were "physically defective or diseased, such
defect or disease being of a nature to cause dependency or to affect the
ability of the alien for self-maintenance" (Kraut, 275-76). In keeping with the nondependency rule, pregnancy formed Class C of exclud
able diseases. This epidemic taxonomy was by no means stable and,
during the active years of the immigration station, new medical condi
tions appeared on physicians' charts while some others lost primacy.
Deployed as an exclusionary tool, the classificatory system con
tained and controlled both migrants and U.S. citizens through a strat
egy of difference and division. Nikolas Rose, in a Foucauldian account
of medicine and knowledge, comments on the power of medical clas
sifications to differentiate and thus "to locate persons and groups under one system of authority and to divide them from those placed under another" (58). The epidemiologic charts on Ellis Island produced new racial epistemologies that helped to solidify a northwestern Euro
pean racial category against its southeastern European counterpart.
Moreover, the list of afflictions from gonorrhea and syphilis to "insan
ity," "feeblemindedness," and pregnancy collapsed entire epistemic
systems into the single category of "pathology." Pathology made some
social identities more visible than others and secured an implicit link
tying depraved sexualities and poverty to weak minds and bodies; it
further turned pregnancy into an impairment and made certain gen der identities a cause for exclusion. For instance, sexual deviance was
believed to "impair" the immigrant's body and to jeopardize the ideal
nation that Ellis Island as an institution tried to maintain?whence
the inspectors' urgency to discover immigrants betraying "abnormal
appetites" (Luibheid, 9). The Book of Instructions for the Medical Inspection
of Immigrants urged inspectors to take special care to discover disguised
prostitutes, and placed pregnancy among those disabling conditions
that necessitated further inspection. The inspector was to decide
"whether she [the immigrant] is legitimately pregnant," a suggestion
that, notwithstanding its absurdity, reveals the norms of morality that
the medical charts indirectly enforced (Unrau, 659). Medical regula tions and epidemic classifications worked at their best on Ellis Island
when enforced by other more or less salient hegemonic systems, such
as gender, class, and sexuality, which legitimated and brought into
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 151
the open the scientific axiology. Such social and medical taxonomies,
though seemingly natural, are the corollaries of the continuous polic
ing of public and private identities, as Robert McRuer astutely shows.
Normalcy in general and "compulsory ablebodiedness," in particu lar, originate in a process of enforcement, and it functions to conceal
"with the appearance of a choice, a system in which there actually is
no choice" (McRuer, 93). From the insistence on normal bodies and
minds to the imperative of decent sexualities, compulsory ablebod
iedness and normalcy underlined the agenda of the New York immi
gration station.
The assimilation of immigrants according to the ideology of able
bodiedness gained renewed force in the aftermath of the Immigration Act of 1907, a statute that expanded the class of deportable chronic
disabilities to comprise any impairment likely to make the immigrant reliant on the nation's socio-economic resources (Markel and Stern,
1319). In the early years of the twentieth century, as Markel and Stern
demonstrate, epidemics no longer represent the main reason for rejec tion at ports of entry; with the advent of technology, a new set of
physical and cognitive "impairments" mushrooms on the medical
charts, from feeblemindedness and illiteracy to constitutional weak
ness and an endless list of other conditions that fall under the label of
chronic disabilities and render those affected "public charges" (1316). Under these circumstances, previous epidemic taxonomies change
shape and meaning and are rearticulated to fit the newly ratified cat
egory of "liable to become a public charge"?a dependency rhetoric,
deployed at ports of entry to reject anyone unable to lead an inde
pendent existence and purportedly to earn a living. According to a
disability-informed social critique, the rejection of dependency not
only misunderstands the inherently dependent nature of all social re
lations but also imagines independence based on ableist conceptions of
the mind and body, thereby insinuating an exaggerated and untenable
ideal of individual autonomy into citizenship norms and healthcare
practices.6 Because of its insistence on autonomy and self-sufficiency, the Ellis Island dependency rhetoric enforced an ableist approach to
civic participation and rendered immigrants ineligible for landing even when family already in the United States testified on their behalf and promised financial support.
The effects of the Immigration Act of 1907 were immediate and
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152 | ROXANA GALUSCA
devastating. The percentage of those excluded based on medical cri
teria increased from 2 percent in 1898 to 57 percent in 1913 and 69 per cent in 1915, elevating the dependency rhetoric to the religiosity of a
mantra on Ellis Island (Markel and Stern, 1319). The problem, how
ever, did not lie in the inspectors' frequent recourse to the discourse
of individual autonomy; in effect, it was the equivocal formulation of
a verdict such as "liable to become a public charge" that enabled in
spectors to use it randomly and invent diagnoses at a quick glance. The
vague articulation of the dependency casuistry transformed the med
ical inspection into a flexible and contingent process whose produc tion of new diagnoses sprang from sociopolitical circumstances and
was inflected by inspectors' prejudices. The inspectors' vulgar epistem
ologies operated to reduce the heterogeneous masses of immigrants to the category of the "alien disabled other" and therefore "a public
charge" and deportable, reinforcing a seamless dogma of normalcy. Under these circumstances, pregnancy, in particular, posed a
series of problems for immigration inspectors because the alleged
dependency of women in general and of pregnant women in particu lar dubbed them "liable to become a public charge" before landing. In
addition, a pregnancy occurring outside marriage placed pregnant women in the category of morally corrupt outlaws. National fears
of dependent newcomers circumscribed women's bodies within a
national discourse on healthy mothers and pure wives. In the process, women's reproduction and sexuality entered an imaginary social con
tract with the receiving nation-state, their own bodies and gender coded identities becoming public property that could be openly
negotiated and exchanged within the sociopolitical agenda of the state.
In the words of Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, "the nation be
comes gendered, and women's sexuality becomes nationalized. Nation
is equated with the male subject position, and women's sexuality is
reified as the property of the male nation" (Luibheid, xix). It is not sur
prising, then, that Catherine Dolan, a pregnant unmarried woman,
found herself deported on charges of being "liable to become a pub lic charge," guilty of both pregnancy and unguarded sexuality (3-6).
Even less extraordinary is immigration officials' response to the case
of Mexican immigrant Alejandra Veles, who arrived in New York by
steamship. Alejandra's male costume and boyish appearance proved to be a ruse when inspectors discovered that she was a young woman.
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 153
As a consequence of her scandalous act and appearance, they ordered
her immediately deported (11-12).
More significantly, the ultimate goal of Ellis Island inspectors, in close relation to the freshly invented dependency rhetoric, was to
make visible the invisible. If, during the initial years of Ellis Island,
visibility characterized most immigrants' conditions, with the rising concern for immigrants' dependent status, Ellis Island doctors began to focus on the inconspicuous aspects of diseases and disabilities. The
main strategy was to gaze at immigrants for imperceptible flaws, peer into immigrants' past lives, and watch intently for any sign of impair
ment otherwise not easily noticeable. At the end of this thorough in
vestigation, the invisible was brought to light, and more often than
not, imagined and invented by inspectors, despite immigrants' ap
parent healthiness and "normality." From the moment they set foot on the island, the immigrants were under constant scrutiny, secretly watched by inspectors' well-trained eyes for any sign of physical or
cognitive impairment. According to Alan Kraut, the U.S. Marine Hos
pital Service physician was "anxious to scrutinize the new-comer
under conditions of physical stress such as that produced by carrying
luggage up a flight of stairs. Hands, eyes, and throat were observed.
The heart of an immigrant who had toted even light baggage up the
stairs could be easily judged strong or weak, and the exertion would
reveal deformities and defective postures" (54). Sometimes, one could
be pulled aside only for looking absent-minded (Ellis Island). The 1913
regulation on the "Immigrant Examination Procedure at Ellis Island"
established the medical gaze as the final authority in deciding the
immigrants' destinies. The document read as a forceful statement that
legitimated the medical gaze and transformed the immigrant into an
experimental immobile site. According to this guide, at the immigrants'
approach, the doctors
begin to size up each immigrant. First they survey him as a whole. If the
general impression is favourable they cast their eyes at his feet, to see if
they are all right. Then come his legs, his body, his hands, his arms, his face, his eyes, and his head. While the immigrant has been walking the
twenty feet the doctors have asked and answered in their own minds
several hundred questions. If the immigrant reveals any intimation of
any disease, if he has any deformity, even down to a crooked finger, the
fact is noticed. (Unrau, 548)
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154 | ROXANA GALUSCA
The medical inspections on the island, and their promotion of able
bodiedness, illustrate what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson names, in a
different context, the "ability/disability system." This system "pro duces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies," limiting in turn
the access to resources and power ("Integrating Disability," 5). None
theless, rather than representing a symmetrical power structure, the
Ellis Island encounters between immigrants and physicians replicated a dynamic and asymmetrical network of power relations, with the
immigrant discourses challenging at times their dominant counter
parts. Because the notoriety of the medical inspections had reached
immigrants in their own countries, travelers came prepared to face
the medical investigations and deceived the physicians whenever pos sible. Many times they would rub the chalk marks off their coats. At
other times, they would turn their coats inside out to hide the chalk
marks and thus eschew further inspection (Pegler-Gordon, 203). In
their turn, the inspectors were well aware that "the nonchalant indi
vidual with an overcoat over his arm" was "probably concealing an
artificial arm," and that "a case of favus may be so skillfully prepared for inspection that close scrutiny [was] required to detect the evidences
of recent cleansing" (203). Moreover, The Book of Instructions for the
Medical Inspection of Immigrants made it the inspector's duty to divulge
any attempt at hiding paraplegia in children by taking them from
their parents' arms and making them stand on their feet to see whether
they could walk, underscoring the responsibility of the inspector to
bring to light any flaw or impairment in the immigrant (Unrau, 659).
The immigration inspection functioned to erase immigrants' indi
viduality, collapsing personal lives and feelings onto scientific mea
surements and questionnaires. Inspired by the phrenological studies
of earlier centuries and prodded by the eugenic focus on healthy bod
ies, the inspectors and doctors on the island believed that they could
decode immigrants' bodies as one could decipher some mechanism.
They often boasted great expertise in noticing any signs of invisible
impairment. Surgeon Howard Knox shared the belief with some of his
colleagues that the facial characteristics of immigrants could reveal
important information about their "nationality, temperament, occu
pation, sexual relations and habits, sensuality, drug addictions . . .
and such diseases as brain tumor . . . melancholia, manic depressive
insanity, chorea, hydrocephalus, idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness,
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 155
higher feeblemindedness (moron), moral obliquity, local and other par
alyses and atrophies . . . renal disease, appendicitis . . . and impend
ing death" (Kraut, 62). The temptation to interpret corporeal signs as
relevant for immigrants' medical conditions was so high that physi cians turned such judgments into scientific truths. One Ellis Island
physician relied heavily on his personal "invention" to identify preg nant women. According to his method, if the lock of hair on the left
side of an immigrant woman's head "hung dull and lifeless over her
ear, it marked her at once as possibly pregnant" (Luibheid, 9). Victor
Safford, another Ellis Island doctor, underscored the importance of the
inspector's trained gaze during the medical inspection and, in graphic
descriptions, compared the immigrant to a worn-out automobile:
As one can see on glancing at an automobile at rest that the paint is dam
aged or a headlight broken or by closer examination obtain much infor
mation regarding the functioning of the carbureter [sic] or the working of the engine, so one may tell without even troubling to secure good conditions for an inspection that an immigrant has a skin disease or has
lost an eye or on closer examination learn something about the condi
tion of his heart or lungs, but the wise man who really wants to find out
all he can about an automobile, or an immigrant, will want to see both
in action, performing as well as the rest, and to watch both at a distance
as well as to scrutinize them close at hand. (244-45)
The immigrants on the island were equally subjected to an endless
series of cognitive tests and trials that promised to reveal the dark side
of their personality and to account for their racial inferiority. Inspec tors looked carefully for any signs of mental instability, such as "face
tiousness," "nail biting," "smiling," and other "eccentricities" (137). Howard Knox, a physician on the island, created a variety of puzzles and mimicry tests that were decisive, according to officials, in sepa
rating the sane from the insane (Shapiro, 138). The wrong answer to a
question such as "How many feet does a horse have?" could throw someone into the category of "mental defectives." One story goes that an immigrant failed to answer the question because she believed the
physician was making fun of her; as a consequence, she was dubbed a "mental defective" and deported (Ellis Island). Many other immi
grants failed cognitive tests because of cultural differences, an aspect that the Ellis Island inspectors never considered. The questions an
immigrant had to answer were not only depersonalizing; they also
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156 | ROXANA GALUSCA
contributed to the creation of "otherness" as physicians deployed im
migrants' answers to create classifications of cognitive impairments. The notorious physician and eugenicist Henry Goddard used some
of the cognitive tests he had created to test the immigrants on the
island. An advocate of biological hereditarianism, Goddard wanted
to prove, using the Ellis Island immigrants as subjects of his study, that the new incomers, mostly from Eastern Europe, were racially inferior and a threat to the nation (Smith, 116-18). His study showed
that fifty percent of all immigrants were feebleminded. Goddard added
for those skeptical about his results that, "it is never wise to discard a
scientific result because of apparent absurdity" (Smith, 120).
Goddard's successful attempt to collapse race and "cognitive im
pairment" was not without precedent. However, the results of his stud
ies reinforced both the inspectors' and the public's attitudes toward
certain ethnicities. "Feeblemindedness" became the favorite label on
Ellis Island, and its direct corollary, according to inspectors' judg ments, was an immigrant's liability to become a public charge. Like
the label of dependency, feeblemindedness was the easiest "impair ment" to be pinned to an immigrant's identity, especially when racial
considerations came into play. Under the threat of racist stereotypes,
immigrants had to be alert and control any bout of happiness, fatigue, or sadness that could lead to their being labeled "mental instable" or
"feebleminded." Sometimes, in spite of their efforts to avoid suspi
cions, they would fall victim to their own racial identities. At a time
when racial taxonomies formed an integral part of the scientific truth,
the inspectors were well educated about each racial group's peculiar ities. Consequently, their final evaluation of an immigrant's condition
took into account any deviation from the inherent characteristics asso
ciated with a given race. As a doctor on the island explained, "if an
Englishman reacts to questions in the manner of an Irishman, his lack
of mental balance could be suspected. ... If an Italian responded to
questions as the Russian Finn responds, the former would in all prob
ability be suffering with a depressive psychosis" (Shapiro, 138). Under
the rubric of "mental illness," categories of race and disease grew
blurry, leading to further classifications and hierarchical systems. God
dard's Ellis Island study sustained a racial-ableist hierarchy, according to which feeblemindedness ranked highest among Russian immigrants
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 157
(87 percent), seconded by Jews (over 83 percent), and closely followed
by Hungarians and Italians (Smith, 119).
As cognitive impairments and mental illnesses became the main
preoccupations of the inspectors, especially because of Goddard's stud
ies, more nuanced diagnosis supplemented the physicians' charts. The
immigrant's terror of being found "diseased" or "impaired" conjoined with the inspectors' urgency to trace cognitive and physical impair ments in their most extreme details. The interaction between the im
migrant and the medical inspector reconfigured citizenship as ability and translated loyalty to the nation as ablebodiedness. To belong to
the American nation-state, the incomer had first of all to prove phys ical and cognitive ability, a tiresome task given the racial and gender
stereotypes that framed medical inspections. The medical treatises and
studies, both originating in and supporting the ableist practices on
Ellis Island, worked to re-imagine the healthy and unitary space of
the nation-state through what Aimee Carrillo Rowe calls the process of negation. According to Carrillo Rowe, space becomes meaningful
only when represented as demarcated and limited by boundaries. The
legitimacy of a state, then, is created by the negation of everything that falls outside its borders. The border becomes "a highly contested
site wherein the contradictory needs of the capital-driven U.S. nation
state clash: the need for cheap labor clashes with its fear of the racial
ized, classed, non-citizen subjects" (119). The bordered space of the
nation-state empowers some and disempowers others, so that "only some people can walk some of the time" (119).
An intersectional analysis at the confluence of immigration and
disability studies unmasks the nation-state's dependency on a coher
ent narrative of fictive ability. Throughout U.S. history, immigration debates have run parallel with public health warnings of contagions,
germs, and disabilities. Through studies and research, public health
institutions have frequently inculcated into the public imaginary the
distinction between the diseased/illegal other and the population within borders, whose legitimacy and ability are given by those very boundaries. The ableist immigration bills that signed Ellis Island into
existence were a symptom of the national need for borders and autho
rized spaces. Such immigration policies transformed the immigrants into negated identities and bound the immigrant's body to the mar
ginalized space of the island. The pathologized immigrant identity
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158 | ROXANA GALUSCA
arose as a destabilizing force that upset the homogeneous national
identity and played havoc with national values of normativity and
ablebodiedness. At the same time, the diseased other emerged as an
excessive and paradoxical abnormality that affirmed the nation-state
in its negation of everything that the national body appeared to be. In
this sense, the Ellis Island individual, by falling outside the bordered
space, became the site of conflicts and crises, negating and affirming at the same time the nation-state. This process of denial left the ex
cluded individual a mere prop in the national narrative of ablebod
iedness and racial purity. Ellis Island functioned not only as the negative space outside
national borders but also as a laboratory that determined and con
trolled national attitudes about immigration. Scientific journals of the
time, such as Popular Science Monthly, and popular magazines, such as
Harper's Weekly and Puck, commented on, analyzed, and ridiculed the
incoming waves of migrants. The move was always unidirectional, with the scientific and medical judgments influencing the opinions of
the amateurs. Anna Pegler-Gordon, in an ingenious and compelling
analysis of the photographic documentation on the island, theorizes
Ellis Island as the site that shaped popular feelings vis-a-vis immigra tion: "Ellis Island was never simply a site for inspecting and record
ing the immigrants who passed through its doors or were returned to
Europe. It was a place for the staging of changing ideas about immi
gration" (173). The formative role of the island is most evident in the
"Visitors' Guide to Ellis Island" (1913), a guide meant to assist New
Yorkers, keen on visiting the island, to find their way on the site. Turned
into a museum even before it became history, Ellis Island was open to
visitors every day, except for Sundays. The visitors had to file an appli cation for permission and, once approved, could spend a whole day on
the island, watching from the gallery above the main floor the medi
cal examination of immigrants. The immigrants' dining room, "where
detained immigrants [were] fed at the expense of steamship compa
nies," and their dormitories, closed otherwise to visitors between
11:45 and 1:30, were the most popular sites of attraction (Unrau, 545).
In a gesture reminiscent of nineteenth-century freak shows, college
professors even brought groups of students to observe the exotic im
migrant (Pegler-Gordon, 192).
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 159
Under the continuous gaze of the inspectors and the public, the
immigrant was interpreted as I'homme extraordinaire, the freak body, defined and constructed in contrast with I'homme moyen, the decent
and physically "normal" individual (Garland-Thomson, Extraordi
nary Bodies, 63-66). According to Garland-Thomson, "the meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies reside not in inherent physical
flaws, but in social relationships in which one group is legitimated by
possessing valued physical characteristics and maintains its ascen
dancy and its self-identity by systematically imposing the role of cul
tural or corporeal inferiority on others" (7). Constructed as different
because of their f oreignness and supposed disease and defined in rela
tion to the American tourists at ease on the site, the immigrants stood
for "the extraordinary," to be displayed and stared at. As Ellis Island
inspector Philip Cowen commented, Ellis Island became a circus and
a zoo, where visitors came "to see the animals" (Pegler-Gordon, 193).
The immigrant was "formed by differentiation," pitted against the
decent and healthy American visitor, in a process of counteridentifi
cation by which visitors defined themselves as ablebodied. Concur
rently, this type of live tourism offered the government the opportunity to deliver publicly the message of a nation threatened by outsiders
and to advertise its representatives as national saviors. The wretched
masses of immigrants, tired and dirty, created an image that encour
aged anti-immigration attitudes. They were certainly a stark contrast
to the well-dressed and purportedly educated bourgeoisie strolling on the island.
Ellis Island, as a diseased site, represented both fear and attrac
tion for tourists. The sight of the expelled immigrants alleviated citi
zens' anxiety about "strangeness" and underpinned an appropriate discourse on national values of ability and racial purity in the face of
invaders from the other side of the globe. The amateurish gaze of the
visitor supplemented that of the physicians, and both collaborated to
support a system of classifications based on normativity. Thus, national
narratives of ability took shape both through touristic gazes of coun
teridentification and through the inspectors' redundant transcription of ideal citizenship against the alien others. In this way, fictive ability was staged publicly as the prerogative of a few white, ablebodied,
male, and heterosexual citizens.
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160 | ROXANA GALUSCA
CONCLUSION
As the first and largest immigration station in the United States, Ellis
Island translated ideals of nation and citizenship into a medical dis
course based on Active ability. The medical inspections on the island
represented not only a prerequisite for citizenship but also a prereq uisite for redefining the nation in objective scientific terms. Medical
science served to blur the demarcations between human difference
and pathology, leading to a rendition of foreignness as always already
contagious. Fictive ability, then, functioned as the imaginary standard
against which immigrants were judged and which informed national
attitudes toward race, gender, and class. Moreover, ability and health
were made to appear as inherited traits to be defended at any cost, be
traying the fantasy that an ideal state always attracts and produces
healthy citizens?citizens who maintain in turn the moral, physical, and intellectual vigor of their home nation. Thus, the United States
emerged as a privileged space, scientifically designed to protect the
chosen few from the crowds of diseased incomers amassing at its
borders.
The nation-state has always been haunted by the specter of its
others. At first glance, it may seem that merely acknowledging those
marginal to the state will suffice to offer a potent critique of its con
struction. A critical account of nationality, however, must rely on a
vision of many others, both those within and without, and approach otherness on the model of intersectional theory, situating disability studies among theories of race, gender, and class. Only an intersec
tional approach that makes visible the central role of disability in
national narratives will shed light upon the ubiquity of ability and its
medical enforcement in the makeup of the nation-state. When inter
rogated at multiple intersections with disability, the nation-state shows
itself for what it truly is?an ideology that depends for its cohesive
ness on other no less significant ideologies.
Notes
I would like to thank Tobin Siebers for his insightful comments and invalu
able help during the drafting of this essay.
1. Although active long after World War II, Ellis Island stopped functioning as an immigration processing station in 1924. During World War I, the decline of
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FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY | 161
immigrants coming in through Ellis Island resulted in the use of the island pri marily as a military hospital and detention center for war prisoners. In the 1920s,
the new immigration law transferred the main responsibility for immigrant inspec tion to each country's consulates (Unrau, xx). As a result, after 1924, Ellis Island
was primarily employed as a deportation station only for those immigrants whose
status was questionable or who required medical treatment.
2. See, among others, Abel; Markel and Stern.
3. For more on the medical versus social and cultural models of disability, see Albrecht; Snyder and Mitchell; Russell; Wendell.
4. Throughout this essay, I refer to the southeastern European immigrants
processed on Ellis Island as racial and not ethnic subjects. I agree with David
Roediger and Matthew Jacobson, among others, that race and not ethnicity defines
the incomers' status in early twentieth-century U.S. society and that such con
cepts as "ethnicity" and "ethnic" as used today are anachronistic for the begin
ning of the twentieth century. In his historical exploration of whiteness, Roediger
argues that newcomers on Ellis Island, most of them of southeastern European
ancestry, were viewed not only as belonging to alien cultures but also as being of
a different race from their white Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Terms used to refer
to these immigrants, such as "in-between immigrants," "new immigrants," and
"dark whites," support Roediger's point that Ellis Island immigrants should appear in contemporary histories as racial and not ethnic subjects.
5. In 1892, Ellis Island was designed for the inspection of several thousand
immigrants per day, sometimes exceeding five thousand. April 17, 1907 has re
mained in the island's history the busiest day, with 11,747 immigrants being pro cessed. The same year also witnessed the largest number of immigrants landing on the island, over one million (Shapiro, 109).
6. On issues of interdependency in disability studies, see Kittay; Carey. For
a thorough historical account of immigration regulations vis-a-vis those incomers
considered "liable to become a public charge," see Baynton and his investigation of deaf mutes on Ellis Island, "The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes.'"
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