ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“A Coarse Sieve:” The Measurement of Disability in British Immigration Health Inspections, 1906–1939

• In Event: Disability Sciencing: Measuring and Classification at Sites of Knowledge-Making

English Abstract

In 1906 a 37-year-old Jewish woman named Rosa with two children was turned away from Britain because of her perceived “weakness.” Maglen (2005) has demonstrated that management of the eye disease trachoma was used to justify the exclusion of Jewish immigrants from Britain. The medical examinations used in Britain following the more stringent 1919 and 1920 Aliens Order have been studied in detail by Taylor (2016), adding to the scholarship demonstrating how strong links between class and disease were enacted through immigration legislation. It is striking, however, that the paramount importance of disability in these histories has not been foregrounded. Douglas Baynton’s (2016) research into the relationship between U.S. immigration and disability has explicitly detailed the prominence of disability in both eugenics and in anti-immigration literature. Bright et al’s (2025) article features a call to address this issue at a global level, contending that immigration systems historically developed across nations were based on excluding both particular races and the “eugenically unfit.” By showing how disability was identified, categorised, and mapped by immigration officers who certified certain immigrants as “undesirable,” this paper will explore how the Aliens Acts were practically administered to deny disabled people entry to Britain during the interwar period. By analysing how the tools of science were used and contested in case studies drawn from the National Archives Ministry of Health files and from their discussion in the Jewish Chronicle, this paper will demonstrate the interrelationships between disability, race, and gender in the British context as they were enacted in immigration health inspections.

Author

• Coreen A. McGuire, Durham University