“How about people coming through an open border, 13,000 of them were killers. Many of them murdered more than one person, and are now living happily in the United States. You know, now the killer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in us right now.”
“‘s character our future civilization will be changed by ‘blood’ or the natural hereditary traits that reproductive sex brings to our shores. This change will be evident in the degree to which the descendants of immigrants form our future citizens. Therefore, we should make the possession of desirable natural characteristics one of the conditions for accepting sexually fertile immigrants.’
Two quotes, said by two men, separated by a century. However, both directed their words against immigrants. And both were based on the xenophobic logic and pseudoscientific understanding of heredity that defines eugenics.
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Eugenia Decades ago it was denied that he was biologically unfit and morally reprehensible, but Donald Trump he has repackaged his essential lies to appeal to twentieth-century American anxieties. In his worldview, there are inheritors and non-possessors. Biology is used, not to draw attention to what all humans have in common, but to manufacture artificial divisions. It’s a tool of dehumanization, that some people are inherently broken, inherently evil, inherently different. It is a weapon of the powerful, used to convey the idea that there is a natural order to humans.
However, in spouting their misguided ideology, Trump and many of his MAGA acolytes show that they know nothing about American history or biology. If they did, they would know that the divisive rhetoric they are shouting today is the same that eugenicists, politicians, and the like aimed at many of their ancestors—including the people of Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Italy—a century ago. When we do not know history or deliberately ignore it, we are doomed to repeat it.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an influx of immigrants from Europe and Asia raised concerns among American citizens about the nation’s demographic changes. Foreigners, he said, were not assimilated; they brought crime and poverty. The greatest concern, according to eugenicists, was that these antisocial tendencies were innate—that the genes of crime and poverty were being introduced into the blood of immigrants to the country. Eugenicists divided the world into “fit” and “unfit” and believed that when a nation promoted more growth among people believed to have genes for leadership and honesty, and less growth among people with genes for low intelligence (“weakness” eugenics parlance) and depravity.
Harry Laughlinthe most prominent American eugenicist of the time, he made the biological case for putting eugenic principles into practice. One method sterilized people deemed unsuitable already living in the US; More than 60,000 Americans were sterilized During the century, the world would be a better place if they didn’t breed under the eugenics idea. But sterilization was not the only method available to eugenicists. Laughlin argued that immigration restriction was another way to keep the misfits out of the US. The second quote above is just one example of his extensive testimony to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920, where he made the case before Congress for reducing immigration from parts of Asia and Europe.
To some extent, Laughlin’s testimony was successful. Four years after his testimony, the eugenically inspired Immigration Act of 1924 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, this legislation – which turns a century old this year – established a restrictive quota system, indiscriminately excluding entire continental regions and preventing hundreds of thousands of people from making a home in the US. He pushed nativist and racist ideas about who was and wasn’t in America.
By another measure, however, Laughlin’s eugenics was a historical disaster. rising tide of scientists against eugenics he challenged the biological myths underlying his vision. Genetic studies of plants, fruit flies, animals, and humans increasingly revealed how chromosomes and genes worked. The human genome was found to be much more complex than eugenicists had thought. There was simply no gene for crime or poverty, let alone leadership or honesty. What’s more, social scientists simultaneously discovered the ways in which things like crime and poverty were affected by features of the environment: poor economic opportunities, food and housing insecurity, racial and ethnic discrimination that hindered employment. “Unfit” was simply a derogatory mockery of people who looked, talked, prayed, and ate differently, clothed in a contrived gloss of scientific legitimacy.
Geneticists have been doing all this for years. Yet Donald Trump speaks as if he has learned nothing from biology since Laughlin testified before Congress over 100 years ago.
“We’ve got a lot of bad Gee in our country right now,” is just the latest in a pattern of eugenic comments the former president has made over the years. In December 2023, during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, he warned that undocumented immigrants. “poison the blood of our people”. Four years ago he told a group of white lilies in Minnesota: “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. It’s a lot about genes, don’t you think?’
He’s been spewing this nonsense for decades. In 2007, Larry King was the recipient of Trump’s legacy lesson. Speaking about the company’s work in the Learning Annex of King’s show, Trump said of talent and business success: “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there’s something in the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.” And go all the way back to 1998, when he told Oprah Winfrey that in order to achieve financial success, “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have the right genes.” His premise was that success or failure comes entirely from this innate ability.
Today, immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Guatemala and Honduras have replaced the previous fears of those coming from Ireland, Italy and Poland. Killing genes instead of “weakness” genes. A plan to forcefully deport millions of people living in the US furthers Laughlin’s goal of keeping them out. Modern biology tells us that immigrants entering the US today are not fundamentally different at the genomic level from citizens already living in the country. They do not harbor any genes of crime or poverty. They are not inherently more or less “right” than anyone else.
Laughlin’s brand of eugenics scarred the nation for generations. It offered a scientific facade of intolerance, mistrust, discrimination and isolationism. It wreaked economic and employment havoc on the industries it sought to protect. He dehumanized others in the name of biology. He divided the world between those with right and wrong “blood”, the racist code of bad genes.
America, a land of immigrants and diverse groups, cannot afford the price of social division and violence brought by a president who spews racism based on false science. Trump is using debunked eugenics theories to incite racial hatred. Eugenia was never great, and we can’t pretend she can be great again.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
