摘要：Throughout the 20th century, US public health and immigration policies intersected with and informed one another in the country's response to Mexican immigration. Three historical episodes illustrate how perceived racial differences influenced disease diagnosis: a 1916 typhus outbreak, the midcentury Bracero Program, and medical deportations that are taking place today. Disease, or just the threat of it, marked Mexicans as foreign, just as much as phenotype, native language, accent, or clothing. A focus on race rendered other factors and structures, such as poor working conditions or structural inequalities in health care, invisible. This attitude had long-term effects on immigration policy, as well as on how Mexicans were received in the United States. US IMMIGRATION POLICY WAS fairly open until the end of the 19th century, because immigrant labor was needed to help build and settle the expanding country. Federal restrictions on immigration did not appear until 1891, when Congress passed the first comprehensive immigration law. The law allowed immigrants to be barred from the United States for various reasons, ranging from being convicted of a crime to being considered likely to become a public charge, but many involved standards of fitness. Anyone considered “feebleminded,” “insane,” or likely to spread a “dangerous and loathsome contagious disease” was barred from the United States. An immigrant who was allowed entry into the United States but later fell ill and became a public charge (or even was thought likely to become a public charge) faced the possibility of deportation. 1 During the early 20th century, as public health as a field and profession became more established, it increasingly influenced immigration policy. Open in a separate window Far left. Mexican immigrants were depicted as “[t]he type of people who are bringing typhus and other diseases into California from Mexico” by the monthly health bulletin. Source . The California State Board of Health Monthly Bulletin, October 1916. At the same time that US immigration and public health policies were becoming more interwoven, Mexican immigration to the United States began to increase. From 1900 to 1930, the Mexican population in the United States more than doubled every 10 years. By 1930, an estimated 1.5 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans lived in the United States. 2a Most Mexicans arrived as low-paid laborers who worked mainly in industries such as agriculture and railroad building. Nativists denounced Mexican immigrants as unable to assimilate, less intelligent than White Americans, and “for the most part, Indian,” 2b (p60) and therefore racially inferior. Increasingly, these stereotypes took the form of negative medicalized representations, giving rise to significant ramifications for immigration policy and securing the nation's borders. Public health standards based on perceived racial difference influenced both the treatment and perceptions of Mexican immigrants not just at the time they crossed the border, but long after they settled in the United States.
