Isabella Lopez, The University of California – Santa Barbara

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Abstract

This article examines the way in which U.S. immigration policies from the 1920s to the 2020s have been influenced by racialized stereotypes rooted in twentieth-century eugenic thought targeting Latin American immigrants. Eugenic beliefs prioritizing White-superiority link the historical labor exploitation of Latin American immigrants to modern immigration enforcement practices. Racialized stereotypes used to discriminate against Latin American immigrants in the twentieth-century focused on the supposed threat they posed to public health. The stereotype of the “unhealthy” Latin American immigrant in the twentieth-century was rooted in suppressed eugenic ideals. It resurfaced in the 2010s, but this time labeling the Latin American immigrant as “criminal.” This article analyzes how eugenic rhetoric and popular sentiment of various racial groups influence U.S. immigration policy, specifically the 1924 National Origins Act, the Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964, and the ICE raids in 2025. The racialized rhetoric used to fuel the formation of these policies has resulted in the defamation of large populations, caused unjust suffering, and resulted in the self-policing of Latin American immigrants to minimize the risk of systemic, racialized violence.

1. Introduction

The first 100 days of a president’s term are a symbolic benchmark, often used to showcase rapid action and policy direction. President Donald Trump began his 2024 presidency with rapid policy enforcement action that sought to institutionalize discrimination against Latin American immigrants, resulting in the United States seeing an average of 558 Latinx arrests per day within his first 100 days in office. Latin American immigrants have been targeted and demonized by Trump since his first presidential campaign, beginning in 2015. The examination of stereotypes, labels, and rhetoric used to discriminate against Latin American immigrants exposes how the 1924 National Origins Act embedded eugenic practices into modern federal immigration policy. This act introduced eugenics into politics and enabled the idea that Latin Americans were expendable sources of labor meant to alleviate the U.S.’s economic struggles. Eugenics is a pseudoscience that promotes the idea of improving the human species by strategically breeding “desirable” traits attributed to “environmental causes,” which suggests that desirable and undesirable traits are biologically predetermined. Eugenic ideals coincide with the idea of White superiority, and these ideologies contributed to the maltreatment of Mexican laborers under the Bracero Program that ran from 1942 to 1964. Over time, these derogatory labels have manifested themselves into modern immigration narratives that portray Latinx immigrants as “dangerous criminals” that must be met with aggressive deportation efforts. The ICE raids of 2025, enacted and glorified under the Trump administration, have been aggressive, unconstitutional, and not only perpetuate generational trauma and family separation within the Latinx community, but also violate global commitments to the humane treatment of migrants. Examining the United States’ practices in integrating racial stereotypes into immigration policies is essential to understanding how structured racism within a nation can legitimize global dehumanization. Great attention is placed on U.S. politics as a global superpower; therefore, it is essential that our leaders reflect, through their character, language, ideology, and policies, a nation that seeks liberty and justice for all.

2. Background & Literature Review

Scholars studying race, immigration, ethnicity, and policy are in agreement that U.S. immigration policies have historically been shaped by racialized stereotypes. Historians examining the 1924 National Origins Act, such as Mae Ngai and Kenneth Ludmerer, agree that the passage of such laws requires popular sentiment and encouragement. Therefore, anti-immigration discourse can reveal the underlying animus behind U.S. policy, making it essential to analyze the rhetoric used to discuss immigrant groups. Furthermore, scholars such as Diego Mulato-Castillo and Ngai argue that the 1924 National Origins Act was strategically employed to implicitly encourage migration from Mexico to exploit cheap labor. Mexican immigration into the United States dramatically increased in the 1920s, in part due to an effort to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1917. Immigrants were drawn to the U.S.’s demand for labor and often worked in manual labor jobs, including the construction and agriculture sectors. The National Origins Act enabled the idea that Latin Americans were expendable sources of labor, meant to alleviate the U.S.’s economic struggles. This subjected Latinx immigrants to discrimination by the White populace of the United States, who invented the racialized assumption that they were inherently “unhealthy,” in hopes of barring them from job opportunities and migration altogether. Other scholars investigating Trump’s ideological framing of Latin American immigrants as a force to fear have suggested that his messages revive eugenic discourse in politics. However, many of these sources analyze these events as historically concrete and fail to acknowledge how these ideologies have persisted in U.S. political rhetoric and immigration policies. This paper contributes to existing scholarship by highlighting the consistencies between historical labor exploitation, eugenic ideology, and modern anti-immigration rhetoric and enforcement.

3. 1924 National Origins Act

In many ways, the 1924 National Origins Act introduced eugenics into U.S. immigration policy through excluding and restricting certain ethnic groups from receiving citizenship while encouraging the migration of others to benefit the U.S. economy. This act allowed the U.S. government to establish quotas based on two-percent of each nationality’s proportion of the foreign-born U.S. population according to the 1890 census data. The National Origins Act received heavy criticism as it employed eugenics in determining an immigrant’s eligibility for citizenship by deliberately excluding Asian immigrants and restricting most Southern and Eastern Europeans from achieving citizenship. The quotas allowed the U.S. government to decide which immigrants were the “best fit” for naturalization according to their intelligence, morality, and race. The Dillingham Commission, a major U.S. government body that employed eugenics to aid the government’s assumption of a desirable citizen, proposed literacy tests that would indicate which immigrants would “least readily be assimilated” into the country. Literacy tests disproportionately affected various ethnic groups who had limited access to education in their native countries, therefore perpetuating eugenic beliefs about White superiority, as it was believed that illiteracy signalled racial inferiority. This proposal and the National Origins Act exponentially propelled eugenics discourse, promoting the idea of inherent biological superiority, allowing these topics to intertwine with politics and legislation.

However, the National Origins Act was not enforced in the Western Hemisphere for the purpose of continuing the exploitation of cheap Latin American labor. Mexican immigrants were seen as scapegoats for American economic hardships during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The government promotion of Latinx immigration and labor exploitation to benefit the U.S. economy fueled widespread hostility from citizens during the Great Depression, as eugenic thought framed Latinxs as an “inferior” race unfit for employment in any sector, especially when the rest of the country experienced devastating economic hardships. Latinx immigrants were falsely portrayed as “taking jobs” away from Americans in a time of mass unemployment. This led to feelings of resentment toward Latinx immigration because they were viewed as unwelcome competitors in the workforce. These sentiments festered and led to the deliberate construction of the “unhealthy immigrant” stereotype as a means of stunting migration.

4. Bracero Program

Eugenics-based discrimination, such as labeling Latinx immigrants as disease carriers, affected the way Latinx immigrants presented themselves to refute these accusations. The National Origins Act’s intention of alleviating economic struggle in the U.S. prompted White Americans to perceive Southern border immigration as labor competition. At the same time, Southern California was combating pneumonic plague outbreaks, which made it convenient for White Americans, who feared unemployment at the hands of Latin Americans, to attribute these contagious outbreaks to that racial group. One year after the enactment of the National Origins Act, the Los Angeles Times published an article announcing the California State Board of Health’s decision to implement more rigid “alien” testing to “better safeguard the public health in California from infectious and contagious diseases through immigration from Mexico.” The government’s racialized generalization and assumption that Mexican immigrants had poor hygiene was used to manipulate the narrative and strategically instill fear in White Americans of Southern border immigrants. Government officials promoted discrimination against Mexican immigrants based on their perceived inadequate health. This narrative compelled immigrants to monitor themselves to ensure that they were the epitome of good health and sanitation to avoid contamination accusations. The popularization of this myth of the unhealthy immigrant drove Latin Americans to feel as though they were being surveilled before crossing the border. The State Board of Health’s intent was not to examine potential diseases in Mexican immigrants to enhance their health and safety, but to protect White Americans from exposure to “contaminated” immigrants, while also discouraging Latin American immigration altogether.

This sentiment was apparent in the formation of the Bracero Program, whose recruitment process routinely violated the rights of Mexican workers. In 1942, the United States and Mexican governments made a series of agreements that prompted the formation of the Bracero Program. A temporary guest worker project allowed millions of Mexican laborers to work in the U.S. legally, hosting work sites throughout California and Texas. This series of agreements aimed to resolve an unemployment crisis in Mexico and the lack of rural workforce in the U.S. However, the institutional abuse, systemic labor exploitation, and the U.S. government’s recruitment process of Bracero workers reflect the same degradation, and eugenic belief in the disposability of Latin American immigrants that was embedded in the 1924 National Origins Act. The California State Board of Health made good on its promise of imposing more rigorous physical examinations at the border by introducing highly invasive inspection procedures to the Bracero Program. Elizabeth W. Mandeel, a migrant advocate specializing in Hispanic studies, reported in the American International Journal of Contemporary Research that when recruitment centers opened throughout Mexico, potential Braceros, “aspirantes,” were required to complete a humiliating examination routine. This included wearing identification numbers around their necks, stripping naked in a room filled with up to 40 strangers, and being sprayed with delousing agents such as Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane. The delousing was a preventative measure taken whether they carried parasitic insects or not, under the assumption that these immigrants were inherently unhealthy. Mexican immigrants were perceived as expendable through being denied appropriate medical care and human respect. Mandeel reveals that after an intense transportation journey into the United States, recruited Braceros undergo a second examination. They “were screened, not only for physical characteristics such as calloused hands, but also for character traits that would make them ideal workers: ‘youth, servility, humility, and docility.’” The U.S. government sought to take advantage of immigrants who were desperate for work by selecting recruits believed to be the most malleable, obedient, and manipulable. In seeking Bracero workers who were perceived as “youthful” and “docile,” the recruitment policy perpetuates the eugenic belief that any non-White individual is perceived as beneath them. The ideal Bracero worker was submissive, hardworking, and loyal to their White employers. Therefore, recruited Braceros needed to display traits that were “desirable” to the U.S. government to remain eligible for work. The maltreatment enforced during the recruitment process of the Bracero Program is an example of how the stereotype of “unhealthy alien immigrants” directly contributed to harmful immigration policies with abusive consequences for the Latin American population.

The recruitment process was only the beginning of the neglect Braceros would experience as discrimination continued within the program. A 1963 article published in The Los Angeles Times, one year before the permanent closure of the program, announced that a U.S. probe had been scheduled to investigate Bracero complaints coming from the Santa Barbara worksite. The complaints included that the Braceros were “under constant threats of being sent back to Mexico” if they complained about their conditions. Braceros who had health problems would “receive unsympathetic treatment” from camp doctors, and Braceros “state that they are not given enough food to eat and that the meat is frequently spoiled.” The first complaint highlights the implementation of surveillance as a tactic of control. Braceros felt as if they had to act complicit toward the inhumane conditions to maintain employment within the U.S. The second complaint reveals a paradox: while anti-Mexican immigration sentiment positions Mexican laborers as “unhealthy” or “unclean,” the government failed to provide adequate services to derail these claims. Additionally, the third complaint affirms this paradox. Braceros were not provided with basic human rights such as proper food and sanitation. It is clear that the same government demanding intense physical exams for Mexican immigrants to monitor their health and potential to spread disease, has also forced them into conditions that spawn the diseases they fear. By forcing Braceros into poor living conditions where they are most vulnerable to disease, the U.S. government maintains the image of an “unhealthy Latin American” immigrant, making clear that this stereotype is not biologically inherent, but systematically created. This demonstrates how U.S. immigration policy perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Latinx immigrants to uphold discriminatory policies and practices. The dehumanization of Bracero workers through government neglect and racial stereotypes set a precedent for how Latinx immigrants would continue to be treated in the U.S., particularly through Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and the ICE raids of 2025. 

5. ICE Raids

In Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, beginning in 2015, the narrative of the “unhealthy” immigrant began to re-emerge as national threats to safety were inaccurately attributed to Latin American immigration. His first campaign sparked political debates on his targeted remarks toward Latin American immigration. These claims were often unsupported and reflective of harmful racial connotations, employing totalizing rhetoric to demonize certain racial and ethnic groups. In that same year, The Guardian reported that during his campaign, Donald Trump “accus[ed] Mexicans of being responsible for ‘tremendous infectious disease…pouring across the border.’” Here, Trump shared similar eugenic beliefs to the ones held during the Bracero program. By weaponizing health and cleanliness, Trump was able to gain the support of conservative White Americans whose perceptions of Mexican immigrants came largely from the previous assumptions of “undesirable traits” being determined biologically at birth. Trump’s first presidential campaign focused on immigration from the Southern border, employing in-group versus out-group rhetoric that racialized Latinx immigrants as dangerous outsiders to consolidate political support. In addition to preserving immigrants’ perceived uncleanliness and predisposition to harmful diseases, Trump also scrutinized and dramatized the security threat they posed by labeling them as “violent criminals.” During the 2016 elections, Trump’s campaign was focused on building a wall on the Southern border to separate the  United States and Mexico to keep “criminals, terrorists, and drugs out of [the] country; and protecting American workers and taxpayers against job loss and misuse of the welfare system.” Framing immigrants as the main perpetrators of significant threats to public safety is a demonstration of how racial stereotyping has the capacity to defame an entire community. Threatening to build a “great wall” separating the U.S. from Southern states implies that there is something to fear, or something undeserving of access to American cities, on the other side of the border. Trump situated his anti-immigration sentiment as an effort to protect the “American workers and taxpayers,” yet this statement is exclusionary. Trump’s history of pejorative comments toward non-White groups suggests that his interests are in protecting White American workers and taxpayers from foreign actors, therefore reinforcing the in-group versus out-group concept promoted by eugenicists.

Donald Trump’s eugenic-like preference and advocacy for White Americans have been frequently insinuated throughout his campaigns and years in office. This shows that eugenics has never been eradicated from U.S. political discourse, but is dormant until revived by a political leader. Political scientists Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon investigated Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and political violence that have divided the country since his introduction to U.S. politics in 2015. In response to a comment Trump made during a 2020 campaign stop in Minnesota, in which the President admitted to the audience, “you have good genes. A lot of it is about genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory,” the three political scientists critique this remark by calling attention to how Trump invokes the “pseudo-scientific eugenics saga of White genetic superiority.” In other words, Trump’s rhetoric invoked the pseudo-scientific legacy of eugenics by framing immigrants as biologically threatening and inherently unfit for inclusion. The racehorse theory suggests that, in the same way there are faster and slower horses in races, there are fitter and weaker races determined by biology and eugenics. In explicitly referencing this theory, Trump is suggesting that in order to “Make America Great Again,” the country must procreate strategically, breeding between the supposed “superior” Whites to diminish the prevalence of other races. 

This past summer, the Trump administration sought to employ aggressive detainment tactics and deportations of Latin American immigrants, attempting to justify the dehumanization through eugenic beliefs. In the summer of 2025, the U.S. federal government authorized a series of violent raids and detentions in Los Angeles by using racial profiling to identify “suspicious” individuals. The Human Rights Watch Organization reported that ICE and Customs and Border Patrol have staged hundreds of raids in Los Angeles in areas with large Latinx populations “with violence and disregard for human rights.” The Human Rights Watch condemned these raids for targeting mostly Latinx communities, tearing families apart, and terrorizing the citizens of Los Angeles. The ICE raids of 2025 have highlighted how negative rhetoric dispersed by political figures targeting racial groups can have disastrous consequences on large marginalized populations. The raids elicited a wave of protests in the city, and on September 8th, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that masked federal agents would be legally allowed to racially profile Angelenos (LA locals) and grab individuals with no evidence, warrant, or due process. This ruling gave ICE agents explicit permission to harass and detain individuals based on their assumed race, ethnicity, native language, or job. In allowing federal agents to disregard the basic human rights of Latin Americans in the U.S. before having confirmation of their citizenship status, the government suggests that citizenship status is a reflection of who is fit and unfit to live in the United States. This enforcement of the ICE raids was inherently fueled by the eugenic belief of White superiority, and the decision by the Supreme Court undermined due process principles that are integral to foundational U.S. values by integrating racism and xenophobia into U.S. immigration policy.

6. Conclusion

Harmful anti-immigration rhetoric spread by the United States government throughout the past decade has not only generated false stereotypes of the “unfit” Latin American immigrant, but has also integrated racism into U.S. politics. The Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 and ICE raids in 2025 highlight how perceived threats against Latinx immigrants, such as competition in the workforce, potential contamination, and a danger to society, have influenced U.S. policy. Anti-Mexican immigration sentiment has prompted the unsupported narrative that all Latinx immigrants are unhygienic, carriers of disease, and dangerous criminals. Eugenics posits that race indicates worth in American society, which has led to the creation of hostile policies targeting Latin American immigrants. ICE, law enforcement, and Border Patrol’s central aim is to instill fear and assert authority over immigrants, regardless of citizenship status. This tactic of control has been used for over a decade by American institutions to reinforce White superiority and ensure that Latinx immigrants in the U.S. self-surveil themselves into exhibiting “desirable” traits. To avoid the promotion of these racialized stereotypes, Latinx immigrants might feel pressure to act healthy, non-violent, and non-resistant during unconstitutional detainments. 

The solution to eliminating discriminatory immigration practices is to first acknowledge the racism and eugenic sentiment that allowed such practices to emerge in the first place. Calling attention to the unsound logic behind the creation and enforcement of such systemic abuses will allow the chance for reflection and reformation. Critical examinations of the history of Latinx immigration into the U.S. and the discriminatory practices associated with many immigration programs must persist in order to begin undoing the immense harm and suffering generations of Latinx immigrants have endured as a consequence of these poorly enforced immigration policies. Acknowledging the past, rejecting theories of biological fitness, reforming legislation, and embracing a new narrative are key to achieving real liberty and justice for all.