Eugenicist ideas were "really the start of American immigration law," says University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton.Mother Jones illustration; Samuel Corum/Pool/CN/ZUMA; Circa/GHI/Universal/Getty

Last Wednesday, the Trump administration “paused” immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, mostly in the Global South, on the supposed grounds that people from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.”

Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children.

As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back. I’ve detailed Trump’s long history of eugenicist claims and policies—which he’s since added to, most recently with his series of explicitly racist tirades about “low IQ” Somali Americans in Minnesota.

I spoke with University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton, the author of Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics, to ask what history can teach us about the role of eugenics in the anti-immigration crusade of Trump and White House figures like Stephen Miller.

You’ve written that immigration policy in the United States has been rooted in the exclusion of people potentially deemed a burden. How so?

Until the........

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