Governments have often tried to control the size and makeup of their populations by how they establish their borders, by expelling or exterminating groups of people within their national borders, by controlling movement and settlement, and by controlling reproduction inside their frontiers. Generally, when we study how governments have done this in the past, we are horrified.
There’s a parallel between racial thinking and economic thinking here. One pattern is that colonizers fear losing their racial control over those they colonize. There is talk of race suicide, and worries that people of color are reproducing far too quickly and will overwhelm the white population. Population control becomes a method for preserving white dominance.
The economic pattern is that in societies divided between haves and have-nots, the haves often see eliminating the have-nots as the best solution to inequality, rather than redistributing the resources. As a solution to poverty, the haves propose methods to make poor people stop reproducing.
Because the division of the world, and of individual societies, into haves and have-nots has been so structured by conquest and ideas of racial superiority, the racial and the economic arguments are often two sides of the same coin. And the solution too is the same: find ways to eradicate, and justify the eradication of, poor people of color.
Let’s look at some examples. In the United States, Native Americans were the original aliens who had to be expelled from the land in order to create a white, English society here. English migrants had no intention of assimilating into the land they migrated to: they wanted to replace the societies that existed there. “The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites,” President Andrew Jackson explained in an address to Congress in 1830. This history justified his own Indian removal program, “the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements,” which he announced was “approaching to a happy consummation.”1
African Americans constituted a different kind of alien in white America’s midst: not potential citizens, yet necessary as a labor force. So they were forced to be physically present, while legally, they were nonpersons. Until the 1870s, that is. After the brief experiment with Reconstruction, white society embarked on a century of African American expulsion. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and regulations drove African Americans out of institutions, towns, counties, and even states.
Like African Americans, the Chinese were used for labor, denied citizenship, then excluded. For Mexicans, temporary worker programs and periodic waves of deportation followed the same pattern. The incarceration of Japanese, and people of Japanese descent, during World War II reiterated the message: this is a white country, and you are not wanted among us.
Advances in technology, combined with the development of the pseudoscience of eugenics, provided another means of population control. When they weren’t physically driven out or slaughtered, people of color were the subject of eugenics campaigns to try to curtail their reproduction. The same “eugenical thinking” that was behind immigration restrictions was also behind anti-miscegenation laws aimed at keeping the races separate, and anti-reproduction strategies aimed at preventing population growth among those considered racially inferior.
Part of the rationale for eugenics policies was that medical and social advances had interfered with the process of natural selection, which would have naturally eliminated the inferior races in the absence of human intervention. As geographer James A. Tyner explains, “especially pronounced was a popular belief that welfare and charity programs were counteracting the ‘bloody hand’ of evolution. Rather than succumbing to nature’s law of ‘survival of the fittest,’ misguided philanthropy—including minimum wages, set working hours, free public education, public health reforms—was enabling inferior peoples to live longer and to reproduce.”2
Madison Grant, the U.S. scientific racist thinker, wrote in 1918 that “the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is through the elimination of the least desirable elements of the nation by depriving them of the power to contribute to future generations.”3 His ideas were behind the 1920s immigration restrictions and also provided scholarly justification for sterilization campaigns directed against citizens who were considered undesirable. From Vermont to California to the Deep South to Puerto Rico, nonwhite women were sterilized in disproportionate numbers by zealous doctors intent on improving the race.4
California, consistently the state with the highest rates of involuntary sterilization, kept its law on the books from 1909 to 1979. By 1942, over 15,000 people had been sterilized. Mexican Americans were sterilized at a rate double their proportion of the population, and African Americans at four times their proportion.5
Shortly after taking Puerto Rico in 1898, U.S. officials started to worry about “overpopulation” on the island. “It was first used in policy debates to explain off-island labor contracts, where agents from U.S. business or agriculture would offer transportation to places like Hawaii, Arizona, or Georgia, in exchange for work contracts … By the 1930s, however, the term ‘overpopulation’ had acquired another meaning, one that blamed excessive sexuality and fertility for the poverty of the island as a whole.”6
Women’s studies professor Laura Briggs explains that “by 1932, responding to the problem of ‘overpopulation’ had become the cornerstone of federal policy in Puerto Rico.”7 Promoters of birth control policies in Puerto Rico believed that “it was better to prevent poor or dark-skinned people from being born.”8 In the 1940s and ’50s, U.S. pharmaceutical companies used the island as a giant laboratory for contraceptive research, including early trials of the birth control pill.9
High rates of sterilization of blacks and Native Americans also continued into the second half of the century. In the 1950s, sterilization, “preponderantly aimed at African American and poor women, began to be wielded by state courts and legislatures as a punishment for bearing illegitimate children or as extortion to ensure ongoing receipt of family assistance.”10 Sterilization rates rose again, especially after the War on Poverty in the 1960s introduced federally funded sterilizations through Medicaid and the Office of Economic Opportunity, leading to what one analyst called “widespread sterilization abuse” during the 1960s and ’70s. Between 1960 and 1974 over 100,000 sterilizations were carried out annually.11
The Indian Health Service began providing family planning services in 1965. Protests and federal investigations revealed that regulations requiring consent were routinely violated. In an article in American Indian Quarterly, Ph.D. student Jane Lawrence cited a study by the Health Research Group in Washington, D.C., that found that “the majority of physicians were white, Euro-American males who believed that they were helping society by limiting the number of births in low-income, minority families. They assumed that they were enabling the government to cut funding for Medicaid and welfare programs while lessening their own personal tax burden to support the programs.”12 Between 25 percent and 50 percent of Native American women were sterilized in the 1970s. A study by a Native American physician concluded that Indian women often agreed to sterilization because they were told that otherwise they would lose their children or their welfare benefits.13
In spite of a national outcry when Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías discovered rates of sterilization approaching 40 percent in Puerto Rico in 1965—prompting federal legislation to restrict involuntary or coerced sterilizations—federally funded sterilization programs continued to target women of color. Over 40 percent of Puerto Rican women were still getting sterilized in the 1980s.14 Studies in the 1970s and 1990s showed that black women had double the sterilization rate of white women.15 Former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett revealed that “eugenical thinking” has not completely disappeared from our culture with his notorious comment that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”16
Of course the United States is not the only country to have used exclusionary citizenship, expulsions, racial purification campaigns, sterilizations, and eugenics to try to create an ethnically homogenous nation. Jews, the quintessential “others” in the European nation-states in which they lived, were subject to periodic expulsions and exterminations there. They then reversed the balance in Palestine, where they drove out Palestinian inhabitants and created laws allowing Jews who had never set foot there to “return,” while Palestinians became aliens forbidden to return to their homes in 1948 and again in 1967.
Immigration restrictions against people of color in the United States have historically responded to the same logic as other forms of population control. Today’s immigration restrictions do not explicitly mention race, but they still apply, overwhelmingly, to people of color. And they still respond to the idea that governments should mandate the composition of the populations within their territories, and ensure that socially dominant groups remain numerically dominant.
An interesting twist on this logic in the United States has been the move to take children away from sectors of the population being eliminated and have them raised by the dominant sectors. The Native American boarding school program starting in the late 1800s was one early example of a dominant society trying to culturally and racially remake the population by removing children from their families.
Governments ranging from Franco’s Spain in the 1940s to the dictatorships of Argentina in the 1970s and El Salvador in the 1980s engaged in programs of abducting children of supposed leftists and placing them for adoption.17 In the words of women’s studies professor Laura Briggs,
Raising the “orphans” of colonized people is a very familiar practice. From the nineteenth century French orphanages in Indochina to U.S. children’s homes in Puerto Rico in the early years of the twentieth, managing children and raising youth to belong to a different culture from that of their ancestors has a history. Indeed the white settler colonies of the British empire—the United States, Canada, Australia—made acculturating native children in boarding schools as indispensable a part of their policies toward indigenous people as war and reservations.18
The American Association of Indian Affairs (AAIA) noted in the 1960s that an astonishing one in four Native American children in some states had been removed from parental care into adoptive, foster, or institutional homes. In the ’60s and ’70s, Native American and African American groups including the AAIA and the National Association of Black Social Workers protested the ongoing state-mandated removal of children from these communities and their placement with white families.19
The current growth in international adoptions illuminates the continuing ironies in U.S. immigration policies. Most international adoptions are carried out by white, middle-class families from countries whose inhabitants face severe restrictions in trying to come to the United States. For the children entering white families, however, law and practice smooth the way. In the summer of 2006, as Israeli bombs systematically flattened the country of Lebanon, Lebanese desperate to escape to safety found the doors of the so-called liberal democracies slammed in their faces. Calling to mind what Paul Farmer had said about Haiti in the early 1990s, the country was coming to resemble a burning building with no exits. In the midst of it all, the Boston Globe reported cheerily that “Logan Edward Maroon Gabriel is home, finally.” A Salem, New Hampshire, woman was waiting in Beirut to complete the adoption of the baby when the invasion unfolded. In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who had no way out, this baby’s papers were quickly put in order, and the beaming family pictured prominently in the newspaper as they were welcomed by “100 cheering relatives and friends.”20