Argentina is remembered as one of the great immigration-friendly nations of the modern world. In his new book, Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentine Immigration Policy, 1876–1932, Department of History Associate Professor Benjamin Bryce examines the flip side of that story: the policies, port inspections, and official criteria that quietly barred travellers on the basis of race, health, and disability.
We spoke with Prof. Bryce about how he uncovered this hidden history of exclusion, and what it reveals about the machinery of immigration control then and now.
Argentina has long been celebrated as a “nation of immigrants.” How does Grounds for Exclusion challenge that narrative, and why does the myth persist?
For more than a century, Argentina has built its national self-image around immigration. The 1853 constitution famously opened the country to “all men of the world who wish to inhabit Argentine soil,” and the arrival of more than six million Europeans between the 1870s and 1930—Italians, Spaniards, eastern European Jews, Syrians, and others— confirm this.
Grounds for Exclusion argues that this story is not so much wrong as profoundly incomplete. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentine officials developed an expanding list of grounds for exclusion—race, contagious and chronic disease, physical and mental disability, criminality, indigence, ideological “undesirability”—that deterred people from ever boarding a ship and barred others at the port of arrival. Mass inclusion and selective exclusion were two sides of the same policy. The “open door” was always a controlled door, and the millions who came in passed through a regime designed to keep others out: South Asians, Chinese, Japanese, and Roma arrivals as well as those deemed unproductive due to ill health and physical or mental disability.
The myth persists in part because a large part of it is true. Millions did arrive, and generations of Argentines built their families, neighbourhoods, and political identities around that fact. But the myth also allows Argentina to imagine itself as European and exceptional, distinct from its neighbours in Latin America. The story of the “nation of immigrants” masks other histories, one of settler expansionism and Black erasure. And it hides the other side of the coin, focusing only on those who came and not those who were excluded.
“The story of the “nation of immigrants” masks other histories, one of settler expansionism and Black erasure. And it hides the other side of the coin, focusing only on those who came and not those who were excluded.”
The book covers race, health, and disability as distinct but intertwined “grounds for exclusion.” How did those categories reinforce each other in Argentine policy, and were they ever in tension?
In the policies themselves, and in the writings of the officials who designed them, race, health, and disability were not so separate. They were all part of a central focus on productive capacity. Whether a prospective immigrant could work, support a family, and not become a “public charge” was the underlying test, and bureaucrats moved fluidly between categories to reach it. Trachoma and tuberculosis mattered to immigration doctors because of their debilitating impact, but the same logic justified barring people described as “feeble-minded,” blind, deaf, epileptic, alcoholic, or destitute.
There were tensions, and they are some of the most revealing moments in the archive. A European migrant could meet the racial preference of Argentine officials and still be rejected for trachoma. A Punjabi arrival in obviously good health could be turned away instead because of race and country of origin. Officials had to choose, case by case, which axis of desirability mattered more, and those choices exposed what they actually valued.
“There were tensions, and they are some of the most revealing moments in the archive. A European migrant could meet the racial preference of Argentine officials and still be rejected for trachoma. A Punjabi arrival in obviously good health could be turned away instead because of race and country of origin”
You conducted research across archives on three continents. What sources proved most surprising or generative, and what did the archives reveal that the official record did not?
The research drew on archives in Argentina, Spain, Italy, the UK, and Germany as well as a few in Japan and the United States. The most familiar materials—immigration laws, parliamentary debates, the annual reports of state agencies—give a top-down view of policy and describe some instances of friction. What they miss from their vantage point in Buenos Aires is what happened at a dockside in Genoa, in a consular office in Beirut, or in the back room of a shipping agent in Hamburg, where a lot of exclusionary reviews were undertaken. That was a decision justified by what was believed would happen in Buenos Aires, but it only became visible after conducting multi-sited research.
The most memorable archival experience was the first one, the one that led me to this project. First in the National Archives in Kew Gardens in the UK and later in many other sources, I discovered a growing diplomatic row between the Argentine and British governments about the arrival of 618 South Asians in the port of Buenos Aires. This was a kind of immigration that I previously did not know ever existed. It didn’t make any sense and it did not appear in other narratives I had read. Although these immigrants travelled on Italian ships and with a European passport (as British subjects), just as hundreds of thousands of other European immigrants that year, Argentine officials began charting new boundaries of exclusion, provoked by this new situation. This became a fragment of something much bigger, of a history aimed at preventing more immigration in the future.
Canadians recently observed the 112th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident. As such, contemporary debates over immigration control, border enforcement, and the “desirability” of migrants are very much alive in Canada and globally. What do you hope readers take from this history into the present, and how does the Argentine story shed additional light on this issue?
The Komagata Maru was a chartered Japanese steamship carrying 376 passengers, most of them Punjabi immigrants from British-controlled India. It was held in Vancouver harbour for two months in the summer of 1914 and ultimately turned back under the “continuous journey” rule, a clause in the new 1910 immigration law. But that incident is also a window onto something larger—a regime of exclusion that worked, most of the time, by making sure ships like the Komagata Maru never set out in the first place. Canada built its immigration system in this period around outsourced enforcement: shipping companies were fined for landing passengers who should have been rejected and were required to return them at the company’s expense. Ticket agents in Hong Kong, Singapore, Antwerp, and Southampton thereafter learned which travellers to refuse, and ships’ doctors became de facto border officials. The Komagata Maru passengers reached Vancouver because Gurdit Singh deliberately tried to test the system. Most others never got that far. The Canadian record is therefore, in important ways, a record of absence—of journeys that never happened, of would-be migrants whose names appear nowhere because they were turned back before boarding.
The Argentine story sheds additional light on this dynamic because it ran a parallel system, with strikingly similar mechanics: health inspections in ports of departure, racial preferences encoded in climatic or occupational language, and deportation provisions. These were neither Canadian inventions nor Argentine ones, but pieces of a transnational repertoire that circulated through doctors, bureaucrats, and shipping companies across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. They created an inventory of methods of exclusion.
What I hope readers take into the present is recognition that today’s debates over border enforcement, carrier liability, visa pre-screening, and the “desirability” of migrants are not new questions. The mechanisms have modernized—biometric data, electronic travel authorizations, offshore processing—but the underlying logic of outsourced exclusion is more than a century old. What looks like an open door usually has someone standing just out of sight, deciding who gets to approach it.
“What I hope readers take into the present is recognition that today’s debates over border enforcement, carrier liability, visa pre-screening, and the “desirability” of migrants are not new questions. The mechanisms have modernized—biometric data, electronic travel authorizations, offshore processing—but the underlying logic of outsourced exclusion is more than a century old.”
Any final thoughts?
In Jorge Luís Borges’s El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941), there are Chinese, German, and British characters. The short story seemingly has nothing to do with Argentina. Yet its Eurocentrism and cosmopolitanism are in fact a prime example of an evolving national literary canon. At one point, the protagonist states, “I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths”. In the garden of forking paths, there were histories that never came to be. Argentina, whether in Misiones, La Pampa, or Buenos Aires, is less Indigenous today than it otherwise would be because of the immigration that was encouraged. The country is also less Asian because officials discouraged that immigration, and it is less Black because politicians and bureaucrats encouraged so much European immigration. Conceptualizing exclusion as a central part of the history of immigration is not an exercise in counterfactual conjecture: it is a real story, one that left its traces in its very absence.
The nature of the Argentine settler state was built on the triad of immigration, territorial expansion, and exclusion. As state officials, politicians, and influential thinkers planned and implemented the incursion onto Indigenous lands, they wished upon the body politic a certain kind of citizen. Implicit in that expansion was the absence of other citizens. They were futures that never came to be in the garden of forking paths.
“Conceptualizing exclusion as a central part of the history of immigration is not an exercise in counterfactual conjecture: it is a real story, one that left its traces in its very absence.”
