Engineering Paradise: Eugenics and the Medicalization of Argentine Immigration in the Early 20th Century
Grant Colvin

Political theorist Juan Bautista Alberdi, forefather of the 1853 Argentine Constitution and advocate of mass European immigration, once remarked: “To govern is to populate.” These words came to encapsulate the story of immigration to Argentina thereon. From 1871 to 1910, Argentina’s population increased by three hundred percent (Rodriguez 358). The country began the 20th century as a majority-foreigner nation. Lacking a unified national identity and experiencing broad societal ills, however, politicians began to question the devoutly liberal migratory policy that had filled the streets of Buenos Aires and their slice of the Southern Cone. Reflecting this shifting ideological undercurrent, Argentine physician and right-wing legislator Lucas Ayarragaray paraphrased Alberdi when he wrote: “To govern, is to populate well” (11). An asterisk was introduced on Argentina's nearly open borders. Immigrants would later be partitioned based on their nationality and their health. A new regime of eugenics was taking root in the legislative halls of Argentina as the medical establishment merged with the political. From debates on civilization versus barbarism as well as Enlightenment ideals from Europe, an image of early 20th century Argentina is exhumed to explain the myriad causes, motivations, and effects of an immigration system dominated by medical discourse.

Drastic changes are responses to drastic problems, real or imagined. At the dawn of the 20th century, Argentina was reckoning with its own. First, discussions of crime dominated the atmospheres in urban areas such as Buenos Aires and Córdoba. From petty theft to assault, arson to murder, the historical framing of Argentine urban centers as civilized — a source of pride for Argentine urbanites — was under threat. Urban elites felt their moral opposition to the rural caudillo class’s barbarity slipping away. Second, disease was rampant. Epidemics of cholera and yellow fever in the late 19th century, including one which killed an estimated 10% of Buenos Aires, scarred the collective urban memory (Rodriguez 361). Lingering outbreaks of these diseases pressured lawmakers to safeguard health and hygiene. For both of these problems, immigration would eventually become the answer.

Despite Argentina’s various challenges, it was also confronted with abundant opportunity. Due to massive influxes of immigrant labor, a universal education law adopted in 1882 and agricultural expansion, the Argentine economy was on the ascent. With this came the potential for Argentina to reach new Enlightened heights of intellectual and economic progress. Argentine statesmen had much to look forward to yet much to fear with crime and disease. Therefore, action was necessary to, as Ayarragaray writes, bring Argentina “to a superior level of culture” (27). This action would come in the form of populating, but with people “well-selected, physiologically healthy, ethnically homogenous, well distributed and well nourished, with hygienic lodging and good intellectual and moral disciplines” (Ayarragaray 27).

Fundamentally, legislators like Ayarragaray viewed the solutions to Argentina’s ills not in social welfare or increased policing, but in population engineering. Societal issues like crime and illness became problems (or, in the medical vernacular, conditions) that could be cured by a state increasingly staffed by elites from the medical establishment: doctors, psychiatrists, academics and ethnographers. Criminal activities were not just explained as issues of public health but as symptoms of specific medical conditions: hyper- or dys-thyroidism for arsonists; hyperthymism for young thieves; hyper- or hypo-sexuality for homosexuals (Palma). Criminological data that did not support these theories (i.e., examinations of criminals which failed to produce a medical diagnosis) were often viewed by politicians as limitations in medical knowledge, not as indicts to these pseudoscientific theories. Hence, more credence fell on the need to elevate medical voices in government.

Fortunately for Ayarragaray, a biological human hierarchy already existed: racism. Embracing centuries-old stereotypes of Blacks, natives and mestizos (descendants of indigenous Americans and Europeans), Ayarragaray posited whiteness as the solution to Argentina's social problems. Drawing upon “observations” in his mental clinic, he describes his ideas of racial degeneration (24). While denigrating Blacks, he disparages natives as harboring “little resistance to diseases” and a “lack of sociability, of moral consciousness, and the tendency toward…. malice, lying” (18, 30). Ayarragaray also criticizes mestizos using phrenology, or the pseudoscientific explanation of human behavior based on cranial dimensions and aspects. Before mestizos reach three or four generations of crossbreeding with Europeans, according to Ayarragaray, they display marks such as “narrow or crushed fronts, solid jaws” and “irregular or poorly implanted eyebrows” (17-18). Departing from the violently genocidal attitudes of the past, however, Ayarragaray forwards a solution using his theories of heredity: selective reproduction. After successive reproductions with European subjects, he states that “the hybrid moves away from the native and the Black, ascending gradually toward whiteness” (Ayarragaray 13). His advocacy for eugenics is laid bare.

Nevertheless, the question arrived: How could the Argentine populace best be Europeanized? Targeted sterilization and abortion campaigns, techniques used in the United States against Black women and in Nazi Germany against Jews and the Roma, were mostly off the table as Argentina, a Catholic country, opposed such measures en masse (Palma). The answer laid not in negative eugenics — limiting the reproduction of some — but in positive eugenics: encouraging the reproduction of many. For Argentina, the many were already coming from Europe. Thus, European immigrants became a lucrative commodity for the Argentine state’s ascension insofar as they were critical to ensuring Argentina’s economic and cultural superiority against the illnesses of deviance and bad hygiene.

The liberalized attitude of the Argentine government toward immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century is crystallized in the Manual of the Immigrant, a guide for new arrivals in Argentina written by Mariano A. Pelliza in 1888 for the Argentine government. Pelliza paints a paradisiacal picture of Argentina as “the most attractive place” which welcomes “immigrants of civilized nations” who will be protected by the Argentine Constitution, “the most liberal which ever ruled any modern country” (7, 15). Argentina welcomed immigrants by the literal boatload. In 1926, immigrant arrivals in Argentina were explosively high, especially for Italians and Spaniards. The Argentine demographic revolution was in full throttle.

Many critics viewed the project of managing mass migration as too big an endeavor to enforce a scientific doctrine that lacked evidence. Moreover, as World War II came to a close, eugenics movements in Argentina and abroad struggled to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism (Palma). Perhaps most significant is the sheer volume of immigration from Europe that dashed the hopes of a concerted population engineering campaign. By making their country appear as an Enlightened, prosperous and fertile land, Argentina’s leaders ironically augmented immigration beyond management.

Although the tide of transatlantic migration washed away the lines in the sand drawn by eugenicists, the lessons gleaned from Argentina’s eugenicist past linger. While immigration itself is difficult to manage in large quantities, a nation’s response is entirely its responsibility. As such, bans, quotas and protocols can expose the values of an administration at a certain point in history. In Argentina, immigrants were prioritized on the basis that their nationality made them capable of enriching the republic through economic industry, intellectual ingenuity, and a respect for political institutions.

While it is easy to view exalting the Enlightenment and constructing an immigrant hierarchy as ideologically juxtaposed actions, perhaps for Ayarragaray and others, they were self-reinforcing. If population improvement is an end goal of human existence, as a humanist framework posits, why should populations remain in a state of sanitary anarchy when they can be bettered with human intervention? Evidently, questions like this permeated the minds of early 20th century Argentine lawmakers. The effects of this thinking are clear. The eagerness to categorize humans using medical explanations spawned pseudoscientific theories like phrenology and biologically essentialist explanations of crime that existed to confirm racist and ableist biases about the human condition. Contrary to the Enlightenment’s recognition of the universally intrinsic value of human beings, dignity was not extended to everyone. A selective filter was created to partition immigrants flooding into Argentina’s porous maritime borders based on their capacity to contribute to the labor market and promote Argentine culture. Today, many countries still require good health and guaranteed employment for immigrants as precursors to legal residence. Those whose beliefs threaten the power of a state or whose abilities are not deemed as beneficial additions to a country are perhaps denied a recognition of value. Hence, maybe it is not the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment to fault, but their selective application. Likewise, perhaps scientific progress is value neutral, and its application determines its ethical character. Regardless, for lawmakers, doctors and intellectuals alike, the message is clear: having power is not nearly as important as what to do with it.