Abstract
Disability justice in the United States and globally demands the dismantling of exclusionary immigration policies. This article surveys the development of disability restrictions in U.S. immigration policy and draws on historical scholarship to describe the specific impact of these policies on racialized groups in the U.S. Since 1882, federal immigration policies have excluded people from entering the U.S. legally based on perceived bodily difference, impairment, pathology, mental defect, or proneness to contagious disease. This continued into the twenty-first century through restrictions on people with HIV/AIDS and against people with a “likelihood of becoming a public charge,” reinforced by the Trump administration’s “Final Rule” in 2019. These policies worked alongside restrictions on racialized groups throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After explicit racial exclusions were dismantled through the 1965 Immigration Act, some disability restrictions persisted. Disabled people can be denied entry into the U.S. through the “public charge” rule, which is especially impactful on people from the Global South who have higher rates of per capita disability due to vulnerability to war/conflict, industrial accidents and pollution, and climate chaos. This survey of how disability intersects with immigration policy fuels the demand not just for individual remedy from discrimination, but global disability justice.
Recommended Citation
Jess Whatcott Dr.,
DISABILITY RESTRICTION IN U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY: FROM 1882 TO THE “FINAL RULE”,
34 J. L. & Pol'y
94
(2025).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol34/iss1/5