Two years ago, the case of a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant catalyzed the creation of a class action suit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Jane Doe, the name given to maintain her anonymity and safety as a pregnant minor, and her story of struggle and success captivated… Read more →
Tag: Immigration
Museum Educators Unite: Unionizing the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
On April 15th, 2019, a group of workers in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s departments of Education, Visitor Services, Retail, and Advance Sales voted 72–3 to join United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110, joining a growing movement of museum professionals forming unions in New York City. The Tenement Museum is a unique institution. Housed… Read more →
Emigration as Epidemic: Perspectives on the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Highlands
In our digital age, the contagion metaphor is often part of the language we use regarding the exchange of information. The most popular videos go “viral” online. We share culturally-relevant “memes” via social media that spread like the common cold. But such metaphors are nothing new, especially when applied to migration. As medical knowledge developed… Read more →
Reproductive Justice and Midwifery on the US-Mexico Border
On August 29th, Kevin Sieff of the Washington Post published an article about the citizenship status of Americans born near the U.S.-Mexico border. According to Sieff, the State Department has been denying U.S. citizens passports, citing citizenship fraud via forged birth certificates certified by (likely) Mexican American midwives in rural areas of the Southwest. Following… Read more →
Family Separation Is Not Only an American Legacy — It’s a Racist One
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed a new policy of “zero tolerance” for illegal immigration to the United States on April 6, 2018, he laid the groundwork for reinstating a policy of family separation that historically has served as a tool of racial subjugation. Native American activists remind us just how central this type of policy… Read more →
From Mooktie to Juan: The Eugenic Origins of the “Defective Immigrant”
On a Monday in November 1905, a “little deaf and dumb … 10-year old Eurasian girl” called Mooktie Wood arrived in the US on the steamship Canopic. An orphan with no known relatives, Mooktie had been “picked up” by an American Pentecostal missionary, Lillian Sprague, in the wake of one of the many devastating famines… Read more →
What Will Today’s Immigration Detention Centers Look like to Future Americans?
This piece originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016 and is reprinted here with permission of the author. Janet Golden’s latest book is Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century. Seventy-five years ago, over 125,000 Americans (the majority of them citizens) were sent to concentration camps. Over half of those interned were children. As… Read more →
Itinerant Tacos: A Brief History of Tortilla Factories
The squeaky wheels, the baking corn masa, and the silver behemoth carrying golden circles on a metal conveyor — the sights, sounds, and smells of tortillerías invoke memories of childhood visits to Mexico. However, tortillerías, or tortilla factories, increasingly dot the United States, illustrating a lingering cultural tie to the region south of the border…. Read more →
Eyes of the Beholder: The Public Health Service Reports on Trachoma in White Appalachia and Indian Country
In 1912, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) set out to survey trachoma rates among two populations: Appalachian Whites in Kentucky and American Indians. I knew about the American Indian survey from my dissertation research on Native health in the early twentieth century. But when I read the report from that study, I was… Read more →
Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free: Tuberculosis in Progressive Era New York City
Since January, Americans have grappled with the implications of the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to suspend immigration from six (originally seven) predominantly Muslim countries. The tones of fear and moral outrage sound eerily similar to those from more than a century earlier, when anxious nativists sought to halt the flow of millions of impoverished Jews… Read more →