From “melting pot” to “dumping ground,” or, the rhetoric of bodily incommensurability

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the deeply rooted ableism at the heart of xenophobic arguments against immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, tracing connections to contemporary warnings about foreign embodiment and criminality. Although the demographic under attack has shifted in the decades following the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, there are still shared root beliefs about miscegenation as automatically disabling publics. Because of how an anti-disability stance spans multiple eras of immigration, regardless of the racial or ethnic group in question, rhetorical work on anti-immigrant rhetoric should always consider where such arguments are enmeshed with ableist attitudes about whose bodyminds are worth including in the body politic.