{UAH} History of US Immigration Act

In 1917 the US Congress passed the Immigration Act, and it was signed by President Wilson. The Public Health Service simultaneously published its Manual for the Physical Inspection of Aliens. In its pages was a list of people who shouldn't be allowed into the US: "imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority [homosexuals], vagrants, physical defectives…anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases…all aliens over 16 who cannot read." Zyklon-B arrived in El Paso, Texas in the 1920s as a fumigating agent when a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, purchased a small amount for $25 in pellet form to fumigate the El Paso delousing station. This is where undocumented Mexicans who crossed into the US from Juárez were taken. Once they arrived at the delousing station, immigrants were forced to strip and be fumigated with small amounts of several toxic substances, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, DDT and, after 1929, Zyklon-B. It is estimated that Public Health Service agents "bathed and deloused" 127,123 Mexicans at the bridge between Juárez and El Paso that same year. And though there are no US records of what became of the immigrants, the writer, David Dorado Romo, has chronicled stories of survivors who developed several types of cancers, children born with birth defects and other health issues. Were you aware of this chapter in US history?