Immigration and Eugenic Fears

Adult concerns about children extend to which sorts of children should be born, and which children (and which groups)

are considered “fit” or “unfit.”

PRIMARY SOURCES: RACE SUICIDE

Eugenics

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZEmlyHUUWM

PRIMARY SOURCES: EUGENICS

The popularity of eugenics declined after WWII. Why?

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.”