A Century After the Eugenics Movement, the U.S. Is Again Barring Disabled Immigrants

^{Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash}

This piece includes sanist slurs used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as justification to deny people visas to the United States. The guidance—along with direction that visa officers can reject visa applications for people beyond retirement age and if their dependents are elderly or disabled—is part of a “public charge” rulethat allows the government to deny visas and green cards if the person might use social welfare programs or be institutionalized. 

Many were outraged and shocked, observing the Trump administration’s new expansion of the “public charge” rule—directing visa officers to deny entry to people with disabilities, chronic illnesses or age-related conditions—as a modern revival of eugenic immigration policy designed to exclude, control and institutionalize disabled and marginalized people. The “public charge” rule is not new, but this new definition seeks to restrict citizenship on the basis of possible institutionalization as the Trump...