Moral reformers tended to perceive immigrants as innately predisposed to vice. As a result, some reformers sought to restrict immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment often reflected racial and religious bigotry, as reformers concentrated on preventing Catholics, Jews, and all non-Europeans from entering the United States. Social scientists validated these prejudices by categorizing darker-skinned immigrants as inferior races. The harshest treatment was reserved for Asians. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (see chapter 15), and in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt entered into an executive agreement with Japan that reduced Japanese immigration to the United States. For many Californians, this agreement was not strict enough. In 1913 the state legislature passed a statute barring Japanese immigrants from buying land, a law that twelve other states subsequently enacted.
In 1917 reformers succeeded in further restricting immigration. Congress passed legislation to ban illiterates who could not read English or their native language from entering the country. The act also denied entry to other undesirables: “alcoholics,” “feeble-minded persons,” “epileptics,” “people mentally or physically defective,” “professional beggars,” “anarchists,” and “polygamists.” In barring those considered unfit to enter the country, lawmakers intended to keep out those who could not support themselves and might become a public ward of the state and, in the case of anarchists and polygamists, people who threatened the nation’s political and religious values. See Document Project 19: Progressivism and Social Control.
|
What practices and behaviors of the poor did social control progressives find most alarming? Why? |
What role did anti-immigrant sentiment play in motivating and shaping progressives’ social control initiatives? |