Roots of Exclusion — American Conservation and Immigration Policy

I’ve been sitting with this one for a while. With everything happening in our current political climate—especially the sharp rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric—I wanted to dig into a history that’s too often swept under the rug. There’s this narrative being pushed by conservative politicians today that anti-immigration sentiment is about law and order. That it’s about safety, security, or “protecting American jobs.” But if you know your history, you know this isn’t new. And it’s never really been about safety. This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about race, belonging, and the deeply entangled roots of conservation and white supremacy in America.
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Let’s take it back to the early 1900s. A time when some of the biggest names in American conservation were also the loudest voices pushing for eugenics and restrictive immigration laws. At the turn of the 1900s, folks like Teddy Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday, and Madison Grant were sounding the alarm, not about immigrants from Latin America, but about immigrants from Europe. Italians. Irish. Polish. Jewish people. Slavs. Because at that time, those groups weren’t considered white. They weren’t “Anglo-Saxon”.  And it wasn’t just xenophobia—it was eugenics.

Madison Grant is best known in conservation circles for helping save the American bison and founding the Bronx Zoo. But he was also a raging white supremacist and one of the architects of the American eugenics movement. His book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), warned of the “degeneration” of the white race due to the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

He lumped together Jewish, Slavic, and Mediterranean people as biologically inferior and called for their exclusion through legislation. Grant wasn’t on the fringe—his ideas were mainstream and influential. Hitler later quoted Grant's book in his speeches and even sent Grant a letter where he referred to The Passing of the Great Race as his Bible.

His writing helped shape the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas specifically designed to keep out “non-Anglo-Saxon” Europeans. A cornerstone of American eugenics was that these “undesirable” European immigrants were diluting the “superior” white race. Grant claimed that people from Northern Europe were at the top of the racial hierarchy. He called white people from Northern and Western Europe "Nordics" and asserted that they had evolved in a harsh climate that had made them physically and intellectually superior. He wanted to keep the U.S. racially “pure.” These ideas influenced immigration law, like the Immigration Act of 1924, which used quotas to severely limit people from Southern and Eastern Europe. Grant also wanted to control people’s ability to have children. Grant supported forced sterilization, the surgical process of removing a person’s capacity to reproduce. He first focused on people with disabilities and those who had committed crimes. He suggested that “worthless race types” should also be sterilized. 

But here’s the kicker: Grant’s love for wilderness was directly tied to his belief in racial hierarchy. He saw nature as a way to preserve not just species, but races. He believed that America’s wild landscapes were meant to be the domain of the “Nordic race”—and that allowing the wrong people into the country would lead to both ecological and societal collapse.

William Temple Hornaday: The Zoo, the Bronx, and Anti-Blackness

Hornaday, another leading conservationist and the first director of the Bronx Zoo, shared many of these views. He was a vocal advocate for preserving wildlife—but not people. In 1906, he publicly displayed Ota Benga, a Congolese man, in the zoo’s monkey house. Let that sink in.

Hornaday defended the display, and when Black clergy protested, he dismissed them as “ignorant.” His vision of conservation was one where the land was protected for white leisure and scientific legacy—not for the survival or dignity of all people.

Teddy Roosevelt: Nature and Nationalism

Teddy Roosevelt is often celebrated as the father of modern conservation. He established national parks, protected millions of acres, and created the U.S. Forest Service. But he also believed deeply in Anglo-Saxon supremacy. He praised Grant’s work, admired the “rugged masculinity” of white frontiersmen, and warned against the “racial suicide” of letting in the “wrong kinds” of immigrants.

Roosevelt didn’t just want to preserve nature—he wanted to preserve a white, male-dominated version of American identity. That’s why conservation, for him, was about creating spaces for the “right” people to reconnect with their “frontier spirit.”

Echoes in Today’s Politics
Fast-forward to 2025, and we’re watching the same story play out with a new cast. Immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are being demonized. Laws are being written to keep them out. And the language of purity, danger, and American “values” is still front and center. And here’s the wild part: some of the very descendants of those once-hated European immigrants are now the loudest voices against immigration. People whose great-grandparents would not have been considered white 100 years ago are now defending a version of whiteness that would have excluded their own families.

Meanwhile, how many Black and Brown folks are still excluded from natural spaces, from land ownership, from decision-making in conservation movements? How many immigrants and Indigenous people are still fighting to access the very land their ancestors stewarded?

We can't pretend these movements were ever neutral. The roots of modern conservation are tangled with racism, xenophobia, and the desire to preserve whiteness—not just wilderness.

Thank you for holding space with me to unpack this. Let’s keep asking: who is conservation really for? Who gets to belong? Who gets left out?