Psychopaths, Fruits, and Deviants: Anti-Queer Immigration Law in the United States in the Twentieth Century
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Authors
Kay Keller
Issue Date
2026
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Abstract
The narrative of immigration in the United States has long been peddled as a fair process in which all immigrants were welcomed into the social fabric of the U.S. However, current struggles with deportations and state-sanctioned violence committed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has complicated this narrative. These struggles of unlawful deportations or exclusionary immigration policies bear relevance to historical immigration struggles as well, particularly during the immigration boom of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. During the same time period, eugenicism was gaining popularity in Western Europe and the U.S and began to influence not only common society but U.S lawmakers and medical professionals. This eugenicism uniquely targeted those who we would call queer today. Using queer immigrants as a case study of complicating this narrative, my research suggests that twentieth-century immigration laws were influenced by eugenicist science and a rhetoric of sexual immorality as grounds for deportation and to prevent same-sex attracted and gender-variant people from naturalization and immigration. I use several different court cases, immigration acts passed by Congress, and federal investigation records to present a history of how early twentieth century immigration laws were used to exclude and deport immigrants on the basis of sexual orientation and/or perceived gender variance. The inclusion of queer immigration history in the larger scope of the United States’ history is crucial for constructing a clearer and accurate narrative of the complicated and often unjust process immigrants have had to go through in order to live in the United States.