“The Relation of Immigration to the Prevention of Insanity” (1907)

This article, published in the American Journal of Insanity, the leading American psychiatric journal, provides a more statistical analysis of immigration at Ellis Island in 1906. Repeating many of the claims of “The Diagnosis of Insanity in Immigrants”, Salmon analyzes 100 detainees at Ellis Island on the basis of sex, age, nativity, and race. Salmon rejects the claim that immigrants are more predisposed to mental illness than native-born Americans, showing ratios which connect the rate of mental illness to the proportion of immigrants coming from different countries. He does, however, lament that the race of immigrants is not recorded, as this could identify rates of mental illness among minority populations, using British Jews as a test-case. Like Spitzka and Kiernan decades before, Salmon identified certain groups as predisposed to different disorders and suggested that the “New Immigration” is more predisposed to “idiocy” than the “Old Immigration”, which was more predisposed to “insanity” (1). He singled out the Irish and Jews as particularly predisposed to “insanity” among the “Old” and “New” immigrants.

While Salmon finishes his discussion with an exhortation to treat the mentally ill with compassion and humanity, as deportation is, in his words, “solely for our own benefit”, he continues to advocate for stricter examination models and deportation schemes to ensure the State spends as little as possible on the care of institutionalized immigrants (2). Critically, Salmon stresses that young people form the predominant category of institutionalized immigrants. As young people, they constitute a significant long-term financial burden on the State should they remain institutionalized. Salmon believes many will remain institutionalized, especially as their lack of fluency in English hinders physicians’ ability to connect with and treat young immigrant patients. Here, Salmon was on the verge of truly taking age into account when considering the “alien insane”. Had he done so, he may have realized the difference between immigrants and native-born citizens was smaller than many psychiatrists claimed, as Joseph A. Hill would later show on behalf of the US Census Bureau in 1910 (3). Instead, he operated from the position that age constituted yet another aspect of the financial strain put on the government by immigration.