On October 11, federal judges in California, New York, and Washington granted preliminary injunctions against the Trump administration’s new immigration rules, delaying their scheduled implementation on October 15th. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have employed public charge, which assesses the likelihood that immigrants would require cash welfare benefits, as grounds to deny legal immigration status to immigrants expected to become “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence” since 1999. The administration's changes, which expand the list of inaccessible benefits to include food stamps (SNAP), non-emergency Medicaid, and housing assistance programs, threaten to transform the rule from a relatively innocuous and narrow policy to restrictions designed “to basically keep low-income immigrants out.” Many immigrant rights groups, state attorney generals, and federal judges have voiced their concerns of the Trump’s changes.
Many detractors of Trump’s more restrictive public charge rule have highlighted the policy’s anti-immigration rhetoric and the likely decline of immigrant enrollment in public programs, irrespective of whether their enrollment would jeopardize their legal status. These criticisms rightfully characterize the proposed changes as yet another case of the administration’s hawkish position on immigration, but there is another layer that is also important. By the Department of Homeland Security’s own admission, the new rule could have “an outsized impact” on “individuals with disabilities.” This underlines the problem ableist immigration policies throughout American history and reinforces the problematic notion that disabilities necessarily entail a societal burden.
The “outsized impact” stems from the disproportionate effect the exclusion of certain programs targeted by the Trump changes would have on disabled immigrants. Programs like SNAP, an initiative where one-fifth of the participating households include at least one disabled adult, and LIHEAP, an energy assistance program for low-income families that helps disabled recipients with medical equipment-related bills, will inevitably be adversely affected by the changes. Additionally, the changes to the Fair Housing Act will make it more difficult for the disabled to fight housing discrimination, as the standards by which one can sue discriminatory housing practices via a “disparate impact” claim become more restrictive. Furthermore, in defending these changes for disabled applicants, the DHS cited a 1911 court case, in which one of the immigrants was denied entry because of his “stammering” and another because of his height.
While the reference to a century-old court case is questionable in its own right, it also illuminates the history of ableist immigration policies in the United States. The Immigration Act of 1882, the first law to denote those with mental and physical defects as ‘public charges,’ mandated denial of entry to those determined to be ‘lunatics’ or ‘idiots.’ Subsequent immigration laws tightened restrictions on disabled immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1907 required potential immigrants to be free of or physical defects that could affect their ability to be self-sufficient to obtain medical certificates. The Act of 1917 gave immigration officials grounds to deny entry for persons with “any mental abnormality.”
The percentage of immigrants denied entry on medical grounds rose from 2 percent in 1898 to 69 percent in 1915. The impetus to weed out “defective” immigrants was partly a manifestation of the eugenics movement of the early 1900s. Immigration officials saw their work identifying defective immigrants to be an important facet of the eugenic efforts. A letter from the Ellis Island Commissioner during the early 1900s says that he believed no work was “more important...than that of picking out all mentally defective immigrants [that leave] feebleminded descendants...and influence unfavorably the character and lives of hundreds of persons.” Per the logic of eugenics, disabilities inherently rendered one a defective burden to the state because those disabilities were contagious, likely to be transmitted to their offspring.
The construction of disabled immigrants as a threat rested upon the ableist presumption that the disabled posed an excessive burden to the country’s health and social programs. The official justification for restricting entry to disabled immigrants portrayed them as perpetual dependents on the government regardless of other contextual factors such as age and employment history. This reinforced the dominant discourse surrounding the disabled that their marginalized position in society was a result of their disabilities, not the faults of a discriminatory socioeconomic system.
Trump’s public charge rule, while not explicit in its disavowal of the disabled, similarly portrays disabled immigrants as societal dependents rather than contributors. Despite the DHS recognizing the potential “outsized impact” of the changes on the disabled, and their callous use of the 1911 case, they defend the changes as a way to better ensure the admitted applicants are “self-sufficient.” Harkening back to the immigration laws of the 1900s, the emphasis placed on self-sufficiency identifies the problems the disabled face in society to be an inherent result of their disabilities, furthering the trope of the disabled as a parasitic burden to societal welfare
By furthering the trope of the disabled as a parasitic burden to societal welfare, Trump’s public charge rule, absolves the ableist societal structures that marginalize the disabled’s position in society. The proposed funding cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and the changes that weaken the Fair Housing Act exemplify the discriminatory structural factors that inhibit the disabled from contributing to society in a manner the government deems productive. By justifying their restrictions on disabled applicants as an effort to ensure potential immigrants are “self-sufficient,” the new public charge rule relies on a long-rooted, ableist understanding of the struggles the disabled often encounter as an innate problem of their body and not the government’s failure to engage the disabled community.