ABSTRACT
Bilingual Research Methods: Introduction In 1924 the United States Congress passed what became known as the Immigration Restriction Act, a law that regulated immigration to the United States for many years and served as the basis for discriminatory immigration policies favoring immigrants from Western and Northern Europe over those from Southern and Eastern Europe. The law had an eugenic intent (eugenics refers to “improvement of the gene pool”) designed to halt the immigration of supposedly dysgenic groups, groups that purportedly contributed to a decline of the gene pool. The Immigration Restriction Act relied in part on data from seemingly scientific studies (Brigham, 1923; Goddard, 1914) as well as a Public Health Service project that tested the intelligence of different groups and found that some immigrant groups-for example, Italians and Eastern European Jews-scored lower, often below average, and sometimes even in the “feebleminded” range, compared to other groups. Herrnstein and Murray, in their much-publicized 1994 book, The Bell Curve, described these events as follows: “In the early 1920s, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization appointed an ‘Expert Eugenical Agent’ for his committee’s work, a biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies” (p. 5).
