Keeping White Bloodlines Racially Pure

Many of the same people who helped states write eugenics laws also worked on legislation to protect white racial purity at the state and national level. Harry H. Lachlan was a huge proponent of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which set quotas on immigration based on how many people already in the United States hailed from a particular place. In addition to sterilizations of the unfit that were codified in states' eugenics Laws, there were also involuntary and coerced sterilizations of poor people and racial and ethnic minorities including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans stretching all the way into the 1970s.