The various elements of the U.S. government’s public charge policy methodically targeted ill, disabled, and impoverished immigrants for exclusion and deportation in order to socially engineer the United States population by “selecting” so-called “desirable” immigrants and “rejecting” those immigrants whom officials deemed “undesirable.” Gender and sex could also function as disabling “defects,” in the language of the law, compounding the impediment that illness and impairment posed both to immigrants’ admission and continued residence in the United States. Collectively, these traits—subsumed within this central and mercurial category of “defect”—functioned to identify immigrants who would, according to the widespread and popular eugenic thought of the day, allegedly become a “burden” on the public and endanger the health and purity of the American “race.” But how to identify and define those traits, and their implications regarding prospective citizenship, was another matter entirely, and here immigration officials and American Jewish leaders fervently disagreed.