If you had family that came through Ellis Island in the early 1900’s, but there were other family members who did not emigrate, this book might help explain why they were not able to relocate to the United States. While the focus of this book does not relate directly to genealogy, it explains in depressing detail how and why the legislation that blocked immigration for much of Eastern Europe came about. Asians were already being blocked from coming to the United States by the Chinese Exclusion Act, but before the 1920’s, there were few blocks on people from Europe. These mostly had to do with contagious diseases, and did not block very many people from entering the United States.
The subtitle of this book is, “Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America”. Okrent discusses the individuals who started trying to block immigration in the late 1800’s, and the individuals who thought eugenics should be used to improve humankind. While this did not start out being the same people, eventually there was a lot of overlap. While their initial motives were different, the ultimate results were the same. And of course, the most depressing part is that Hitler’s Germany used our laws as a model. And what was the model? Well, the law finally enacted put caps on immigration from each country. These caps were based on the percentage of people who had emigrated to the US by 1910. Most of the southern and eastern Europeans had arrived after that, which severely limited the number who could emigrate after the law was passed.
Those who first started to study eugenics did not, at first, plan to use it for racial discrimination. But when you come up with a system to improve humankind, at some point you have to decide what exactly you are working toward. Most people would put themselves at the top of any rating system, and most of the individuals doing this research were White men of Northern European ancestry. People from Southern and Eastern Europe were sometimes, for the purposes of eugenics, not even considered to be “white”. Jews and Italians were especially reviled. In addition to using a spurious construct to try to differentiate people, the “studies” that were conducted do not stand up to honest scientific scrutiny.
If this was your family, how would you research them? Okrent tells a story about part of a family who was able to emigrate before the laws changed. An uncle and his family was not. For a while the US family was getting letters from the uncle, but the uncle was killed, and the other members of the family disappeared. Most of us may not have family letters. Once you trace your family back to the “old country”, you might be able to search records there to find parents and sibling, and then, if records still exist, be able to determine what happened to those who stayed behind.