Judy Helgen, Minnesota Reformer

It’s here and it’s happening. The recent revelations about Republicans “joking” about an affinity for Nazism should wake us up to the reality of the moment. When President Donald Trump says immigrants have “bad genes” and are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he has raised the specter of eugenics that thrived in our country and of course in Germany during the 1930s. There’s a direct line from this thinking to the Holocaust.

We need look no further than Minnesota for insight into this ugly history. During the early 20th century, Minnesota and many other states passed eugenics laws to support so-called racial purification. Laws in 31 states allowed the sterilization of mentally disabled and “feeble-minded” people, epileptics and more. Minnesota passed a sterilization law in 1925, and more than 2,000 people — mostly women — were sterilized. In California around 20,000 were sterilized from 1917 to 1952.

Through the 1930s, American scientists at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Lab in New York promoted eugenics and maintained a Eugenics Record Office. David Starr Jordan, who wrote early major works on the fishes of North America and was president of Stanford University, was a white supremacist and supported forced sterilization programs aimed at poor Black, Indigenous and Hispanic women as well as the mentally disabled.

We know that Charles Lindbergh, the Minnesotan famous for his solo flight across the Atlantic, was a eugenicist and talked of preserving the inheritance of European blood and guarding against its dilution by foreign races. He praised Hitler. Margaret Sanger, who was the first president of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist.

The Minnesota Eugenics Society was founded in 1923 by Charles F. Dight, who served as president until his death in 1938. He actively promoted reproduction of the “fit” and race betterment (the State Fair held “fit family” contests).

During the 1930s, Dight communicated with Hitler, praising him for his plan to “stamp out mental inferiority among the German people” and “advance the eugenics movement.” If carried out effectively, Dight wrote, “it will make him the leader of the greatest national movement for human betterment the world has ever seen.”

Our country has had a history of restricting immigrants, e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that limited immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and Japan.

Trump castigates immigrants as criminals and insane, even though immigrants have lower crime rates than that of American citizens.

How could the President release 1,500 convicted insurrectionists yet push to deport immigrants? He’s likely a true believer in the nonsensical race science that was predominant a century ago.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who spent a quarter-century in Minnesota, told Trump at the now famous prayer service early this year, “The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry plants and meatpacking plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

Aren’t we all the immigrants or the descendants of immigrants? And don’t we all have defects?

Let us not forget: We are called to protect the vulnerable, to treat everyone as equals, to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

• Judy Helgen, PhD, is a retired research scientist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. She lives in Falcon Heights.