Immigration and Eugenic Fears

1. Immigration and Eugenic Fears

2. Adult concerns about children extend to
which sorts of children should be born,
and which children (and which groups)
are considered “fit” or “unfit.”

3. PRIMARY SOURCES: RACE SUICIDE

7. Eugenics

20. Sterilization Laws
• First forced eugenics sterilization law, 1907
• By 1924, 3000 individuals had been forcibly sterilized
• Buck v. Bell, 1927
– “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their
imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit
from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles
are enough.” ~ Justice Holmes
• Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1935
• “Oklahoma makes no attempt to say that he who commits larceny by
trespass or trick or fraud has biologically inheritable traits which he who
commits embezzlement lacks. We have not the slightest basis for inferring
that that line has any significance in eugenics, nor that the inheritability of
criminal traits follows the neat legal distinctions which the law has marked
between those two offenses.” ~ Justice Douglas
• 60,000 Americans in 33 states were forcibly sterilized
• While the last forced sterilization occurred in 1981, Buck v.
Bell has never been overturned.

21. https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=TZEmlyHUUWM

22. PRIMARY SOURCES: EUGENICS

23. The popularity of eugenics
declined after WWII. Why?

25. 2012 Pennsylvania House Bill
“In determining the amount of assistance payments to a
recipient family of benefits under the Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Program, the
department shall revise the schedule of benefits to be
paid to the recipient family by eliminating the increment
in benefits under the program for which that family
would otherwise be eligible as a result of the birth of a
child conceived during the period in which the family is
eligible for benefits under the TANF Program.”