Jay Timothy Dolmage. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018. $24.94. pp. 177. ISBN 978‐0‐08142‐5467‐7.

• Author: Norma Coto Smith
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.322
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019

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doi: 10.1002/wmh3.322

© 2019 Policy Studies Organization

Book Review

Jay Timothy Dolmage.Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the

Construction of Race and Disability. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018.

$24.94. pp. 177. ISBN 978‐0‐08142‐5467‐7.

Dolmage’s 2018 book, Disabled upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Con-

struction of Race and Disability, uncovers the unromantic history of immigration. He

reminds us: “We have been here before”(p. 144). Dolmage fastens immigration’spast

to eugenics, racism, and discrimination, but before the reader speculates if this is

another lesson of “history repeats itself,”Dolmage makes it clear that these negative

ideologies have “never gone away”(p. 4). This book serves as a model text for rhet-

oricians. Rhetoricians and policy experts will understand how disability and race were

constructed in the past to then better examine and understand our current stigma-

tizing language. Only in making sense of the social condition surrounding immigra-

tion can rhetoricians begin to expose and reshape today's denigrating narratives.

Disabled upon Arrival is divided into four parts: Island, Pier, Explosion, and

Archive. In the first section, the Island, Dolmage studies the rhetorical space of Ellis

Island. Dolmage defines rhetoric as “the strategic study of the circulation of power

through communication”(p. 2), so he targets both how power moves through Ellis

Island and is framed by the space itself. As immigrants arrived, they were funneled

through Ellis Island while trained agents examined them for defects (eugenics in

action). Immigrants were marked LPC, “likely to become a public charge,”(p. 16)

for poor physique or “feeblemindedness,”a term broad enough to qualify many as

mentally inferior. If feeblemindedness did not fit, then the catch‐all “moron”could

be used. A moron was a “high‐functioning feebleminded individual capable of

'passing' as normal”(p. 33). These physical (and emotional)stamps were noted by

the immigrants themselves, who feared deportation; the other immigrants, who

wondered if they were next; and the doctors, who were now tasked with further

inspection. Dolmage challenges “the dominant cultural memory of Ellis Island

[that] celebrates the process as a rite of passage, arrival as celebratory”(p. 20).

Dolmage’s research brings to light the outright racism and discrimination erased

from our immigration history. Like our current political language, “The immigrant

was reframed as a menace, as a possible strain on resources, and as an undesirable

undercurrent in the national gene pool”(p. 23). The backdrop to the activities of

Ellis Island is more poignant when Dolmage reminds us that at the same time

immigration peaked at Ellis Island, Warren Harding had risen to power with his

slogan “Return to Normalcy,”similar to Make America Great Again.