PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY DISABILITY, MEDICAL INSPECTION, AND PUBLIC HEALTH REGULATIONS ON ELLIS ISLAND

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 .

Accessed: 23/09/2013 12:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CulturalCritique.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 172.12.25.230 on Mon, 23 Sep 2013 12:10:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619827?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


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



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



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




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




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:




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




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




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




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




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



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




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




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




"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




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




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.




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)




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,




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




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




(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




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).




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.




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




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.'"

Works Cited

Abel, Emily. "'Only the Best Class of Immigration': Public Health Policy toward Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles, 1910-1940." American Journal of Pub

lic Health 94, no. 6 (2004): 932-39.

Albrecht, Gary "The Social Meaning of Impairment and Interpretation of Disabil

ity." The Disability Business: Rehabilitation in America. Newbury Park, Calif.:

Sage Publications, 1992. 67-93.

Balibar, Etienne. "The Nation Form: History and Ideology." In Race, Nation, Class:

Ambiguous Identities. Trans. Chris Turner. Ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel

Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1992. 86-106.

Baynton, Douglas C. "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American




History/' In The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Long more and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York University Press, 2001.33-57.

-. "The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes': U.S. Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882-1924." Sign Language Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer

2006): 391-115.

Carey, Allison. "Beyond the Medical Model: A Reconsideration of 'Feeblemind

edness/ Citizenship, and Eugenic Restrictions." Disability and Society 18, no.

4 (2003): 411-30. Carrillo Rowe, Aimee. "Whose 'America'? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in

the Formation of U.S. Nationalism." Radical History Review 89 (2004): 115-34. Ellis Island. Dir. Lisa Bourgoujian. Videocassette. Greystone Communications, 1997.

Fairchild, Amy L. Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shap ing of the Modern Industrial Labor Force. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Univer

sity Press, 2003.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in

American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

-. "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory." NWSA Journal 14,

no. 3 (2002): 1-32.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the

Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

King, Desmond. Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse

Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York:

Routledge, 1999.

Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace/' New York:

Basic, 1994.

"Landed." Editorial. New York Times. January 1,1892. ProQuest.

Luibheid, Eithne. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: Uni

versity of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Markel, Howard, and Alexandra Stern. "Which Face? Whose Nation? Immigration,

Public Health, and the Construction of Disease at America's Ports and Bor

ders, 1891-1928." American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9 (1999): 1314-31.

McRuer, Robert. "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence."

In Disability Studies Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo

Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. MLA, 2002. 89-100.

Pegler-Gordon, Anna. In Sight of America: Photography and U.S. Immigration Policy,

1880-1930. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002.

Roediger, David R. Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became

White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic, 2005.

Rose, Nikolas. "Medicine, History, and the Present." In Reassessing Foucault: Power,

Medicine, and the Body. Ed. Colin Jones and Roy Porter. London: Routledge,

1994. 48-72.

Russell, Martra. Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1998.




Safford, Victor. Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official New York:

Dodd, 1925.

Shapiro, J. Mary. Ellis Island: An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Smith, David J. Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks. Rockville, Md.: Aspen, 1985.

Snyder, Sharon, and David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Mod

ern America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

Unrau, Harlan D. Ellis Island Statue of Liberty National Monument: Historic Resource

Study. 3 vols. U.S. Department of the Interior/National Park Service, 1984.

Wendell, Susan. "The Social Construction of Disability." The Rejected Body: Femi

nist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996. 35-56.



Documents

PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FROM FICTIVE ABILITY TO NATIONAL IDENTITY DISABILITY, MEDICAL INSPECTION, AND PUBLIC HEALTH REGULATIONS ON ELLIS ISLAND