Silent travelers: germs, genes, and the "immigrant menace"

Amid concerns over use of TB and AIDS to exclude immigrants, this book looks at how earlier generations grappled with such problems, from the Irish immigrants of New York wrongly blamed for the cholera epidemic in 1832 to San Francisco's Chinese labourers vilified for causing the bubonic plague in 1900, to Miami's Haitian refugees stigmatized as AIDS carriers in the 1980s. The book describes these and many other episodes of medicalized prejudice, and analyzes their impact on public health policy. Alan M. Kraut is the author of Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1920.