Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

by Dorothy Roberts

Laughlin’s 1922 survey, Analysis of America’s Melting Pot, studied the ethnic background of the institutionalized population in order to demonstrate that recent immigrants made up a disproportionate share of the nation’s socially degenerate members. Laughlin’s conclusion that “the recent immigrants (largely from southern and eastern Europe), as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks,” helped persuade Congress to pass a 1924 law severely restricting immigration. 51 The Johnson-Reed Act, which set numeric quotas for immigration from nations worldwide, not only introduced the concept of the illegal alien, who was denied any legal rights in the United States, but also defined this disqualification in racial terms.52