ABSTRACT
One of the driving forces behind early federal immigration law, beginning with the first major Immigration Act in 1882, was the exclusion of people with mental and physical defects. While anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States has long been a significant area of scholarly research, disability has held a marginal place in that scholarship. Sophie Fuko does not fit into any of the categories that historians of immigration policy have described as fundamental to anti-immigrant sentiment or the enactment of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States. The first major immigration law, the Act of 1882, prohibited entry to any "lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge". The rules governing exclusion for physical disabilities were equally vague and expansive. Regulations instructed inspectors that "each individual should be seen first at rest and then in motion", in order to detect "irregularities in movement" and "abnormalities of any description".
