Interesting thought about your point #2: My mother’s cousin (yes, I know, she’s my cousin too, but of my parents’ generation) was a social worker in NYC and a New Deal Democrat from the word go.
When she died, I got most of her personal papers and some books. I found a case history of an Italian immigrant who contracted TB — I guess this was in the 1930’s. The City of New York social services sent him back to Italy.
Timing is everything, I guess. Nowadays the guy would hire a lawyer and we’d all pay for his care “till death do us part”....
Interesting.
If you Google around you can find a day-to-day description of Ellis Island, which was by no means a hellhole, but where US Immigration DID do some very serious health inspections and where people WERE sent back to their home countries if they were too sick or infirm. In fact the cruise lines were charged with doing those inspections at foreign ports, and to prevent them from shirking that duty the cruise lines were required to return any immigrant back to Europe gratis (no charge) if they were disqualified at Ellis Island.
BTW, my wife went through the health screens when she was an immigrant (now US Citizen) and they are still very rigorous.