Daniels, Chapter 10

     In chapter 10 Daniels talks about the certain restrictions and laws that incoming immigrants had to follow in order to live and be part of the United States.  Admission to the U.S. during the time of 1917 was denied to many different groups including: Asians, criminals, people who failed to meet certain moral standards, people with diseases, paupers, radicals, and people who were illiterate. 

The book stated that there were seven factors that limited immigration in the year of 1917, one of them being the government was restricting people who were classified as "mentally insane".  Any people who were seen as idiotic, crazy, unstable, and had "mental diseases" were not allowed into the states.  The small percentage that were sent back to their native home was mainly due to the fact that the person was considered to have a  "mental illness".  Whether or not someone had mental problems was up to the workers working the border patrol.  It was wrong for any worker to send someone back to their homeland just because they were thought to be “mentally ill” is disturbing.  America isn’t a perfect country so to keep a person out because of one flaw is ridiculous.

The symptoms that classified "mental illness" were norms unfamiliar to doctors or if an immigrant seemed ignorant.  To me it sounds like the  American doctors and translators working on Ellis Island at this time were the actual ignorant ones.  The disease factor is understandable, wanting to keep the rest of the United State’s population healthy and away from deadly illnesses makes complete sense but the notion of ignorance, to me, is not a good excuse to prevent an immigrant from coming to the U.S. 

Another factory was the literacy test.  When I first read about this I thought how could you test a immigrant on literacy when you have no idea how the schooling works in their homeland?  It turns out that this test, in way was not as harsh as "mental illness".  The reason is because there was only a small amount of people who failed the it.  For example, from July 1920 to June 1921, 800,000 immigrants entered the country and only 13,799 people were denied entry.  Of those 13,799 people who were turned away only 1,450 people were deported because they failed the literacy test.  It was just shocking to me that the literacy test was not as harsh and that more than 12,000 were turned away at the worker’s own discretion on what was a mental illness or not.