In these publications, they described Mexicans as racially unfit, with titles such as “The Menace of Mexican Immigration.” While some of these articles were published in extremist journals, others made their way into mainstream publications like The Saturday Evening Post, which claimed a circulation of more than 2 million.Įmployers who relied on the labor of Mexican workers fought to preserve immigration from Mexico-and won. Opponents of open Mexican immigration, including self-described eugenicists, wrote numerous articles supporting restrictive immigration. lawmakers to poor people of color, and Mexican immigrants in particular, resulting in their forced sterilization. READ MORE: America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually ImmoralĬover of Physical Culture Magazine, June 1934, posing the question ‘Shall We Breed or Sterilize Defectives?’ The same line of thinking was applied by some U.S. They know little of sanitation, are very low mentally and are generally unhealthy.”
Box, for example, argued against Mexican immigration this way: “For the most part Mexicans are Indians, and very seldom become naturalized. Restrictionist politicians invoked the language of racial superiority as they strove to extend quotas to immigrants from south of the border. As Mexicans continued crossing the border to provide the cheap labor for America’s rapidly expanding industrial agriculture, critics viewed them as an even greater threat to national “purity” than their European counterparts, who were subject to strict quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924. Women and men of Mexican descent were sterilized at disproportionate rates.Įugenics shaped immigration policy, too. And by 1964, the state had sterilized 20,000 people-mostly poor women, African Americans and immigrants. In 1907, California began mandating forced sterilization of those men and women deemed “mentally inferior” or otherwise “unfit to propagate.” By 1909, a sterilization law was in effect. Such beliefs weren’t just cocktail-party chatter among a handful of extremists they were codified into laws and practices that, in the Southwest especially, targeted people of Mexican origin. The notion that racist Nazi ideologies gained a foothold in the United States is more than plausible given the early-20th-century popularity here of eugenics, the science of improving the human population by controlled breeding. Their plot included machine-gunning Jews on the streets and publicly hanging prominent entertainment-industry figures such as Al Jolson and Samuel Goldwyn. In his chilling new book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, scholar Steve Ross chronicles how Hitler and American Nazis planned to take over the United States, using Los Angeles as their stronghold. How did American lawmakers come to sterilize Mexican-Americans?
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