Importing Trachoma: The Introduction into Britain of American Ideas of an ‘Immigrant Disease’, 1892–1906

Abstract

This article examines how the American perception of trachoma as a disease prevalent among East European Jewish migrants was adopted in Britain in the years immediately preceding the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act. Increasingly rigorous immigration law in the United States meant that a proportion of migrants who arrived were refused entry and were subsequently forced to return to Europe. Steamship companies' interests, however, meant that a number of those migrants debarred from America were returned not to European frontiers but to the United Kingdom. One of the most potent ramifications of this was that trachoma, the reason why 87 per cent of migrants were rejected from America on health grounds, was considered in Britain to embody Britain's role as the destination for those migrants not fit for settlement in America. The disease was picked up by the growing anti-immigration lobby, who used it as symbol of the ‘undesirability’ of the immigrant in Britain.