The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.

“At critical junctures in American history, immigrants have been stigmatized as the etiology of a wide variety of physical and societal ills,” write scholars Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern. “Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy have often been framed by an explicitly medical language, one in which the line between perceived and actual threat is slippery and prone to hysteria and hyperbole.”

Markel and Stern explore the persistence of the notion that “immigrants threatened the health of the nation,” with “health” here being defined in both the public health sense and the ideological (political, moral) sense. So powerful is this persistence that some descendants of those who were once stigmatized now do the stigmatizing. Because most Americans are the descendants of immigrants, a division between “us” and “them” developed around the twentieth century, when a politically freighted distinction between the “old” immigrants who came from northern Europe and the “new” immigrants from eastern, central, and southern Europe seemed necessary. Between 1819 and 1880, 95 percent of immigrants came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, the Low Countries, and the Nordic countries. By 1892, people from northern Europe made up less than 50 percent of immigrants, and that percentage steady dropped as arrivals from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey increased.

These new immigrants ran afoul of hardening racial and eugenicist ideologies that defined them as not quite “white” and therefore biologically inferior and disease-ridden, a threat to both public health and a fantasy of racial purity. A diagnosis of a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” as the Immigration Act of 1891 put it, at the border “almost always meant deportation,” write Markel and Stern. At entrepôts such as Ellis Island, the US Public Health Service (USPHS) acted as the lookout for contagious diseases. But they also looked for cardiac problems, goiter, trachoma, sexually transmitted diseases, and parasitic infections, as well as “insanity, hernias, rheumatism, senility, malignancies, varicose veins, poor eyesight or blindness, and a range of other infirmities.” In 1898, some 2 percent of excluded immigrants were rejected entry for medical reasons. In 1915, 69 percent of all exclusions were based on medical criteria. This was because the list of medical reasons got longer and longer: the “creation and application of categories of medical exclusion outpaced the actual presence of diseases among the newly arrived.”