Stuck in the Middle With(out) You: How American Immigration Law Trapped “Defective” Immigrants Between Two Worlds

Abstract

In 1891, the United States Congress codified a harsher version of the 1882 public charge provision. Commodifying health and pathologizing poverty, the public charge law excluded and deported immigrants termed “likely to become a public charge” according to its conflation of physical, mental, and economic status, shaping America’s image across the world. Though public charge implicated all immigrants, its impact on eastern European Jews captured the attention of pro-immigration American Jewish advocates. My article analyzes American Jewish attorneys and reformers who emphasized that public charge endangered Jewish immigrants who sought admission to and citizenship in the United States. Contesting the administration of the law—and especially the discretion that state officials possessed to enforce it—as un-American and antidemocratic, this coalition endeavored to liberalize public charge by promoting new interpretations of its terminology, reducing its reach, and contesting it through the courts, while contending with the ever-evolving concepts of borders and nationalist restriction. Public charge particularly victimized young Jewish women and girls, whom immigration officials often diagnosed as “mentally defective” despite evidence to the contrary. To illustrate this trend, I explore a case of a Jewish immigrant girl named Esther, diagnosed as insane, subjected to illegal medical examinations, and threatened with imminent deportation over the course of eleven years. I consider how American Jewish communal luminaries intervened on this immigrant’s behalf, simultaneously integrating disability into the field of American Jewish history and investigating how these advocates challenged the premise that illness and impairment disabled immigrants from becoming Americans.