Eugenicists
Eugenicists believed in improving genetic quality by selective breeding, and therefore supported excluding immigrants from the American genetic pool.
"Outbreaks of smallpox, typhus and cholera in New York between 1882 and 1892, heightened concern about the possibility of alien contagion prompted the adoption of individual health inspections for each arriving immigrant. Harry H. Laughlin, an expert eugenicist testified before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, providing in-depth statistical studies highlighting their supposed defects: criminality, disease, and feeble-mindedness.
"The still greater cost in economic and social drag, and most of all, in racial deterioration, cannot be measured in dollars. We have found that in several types of inadequacy the children of immigrants fulfilled their quota (of inadequacy) to an extent several times greater than the immigrant parents." – Henry H. Laughlin, 1924 [2\ |
"Immigration is a long-time investment in family stocks rather than a short-time investment in productive labor" – Henry H. Laughlin, 1924 [3\ |