We are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.[1] Yet “Americans” have often been ambivalent about—or hostile to—new arrivals. In the 17th Century Native Americans made repeated attempts to wipe out English settlers. The early European settlements, especially those of the English, were starved for settlers. They generally welcomed newcomers with open arms.
After independence from Britain had been won, the new United States had to define its own policy on immigration. Generally, the new nation desired immigrants. Immigrants could bring valuable skills, and the labor to transform the continent’s abundant resources into national wealth. All residents enjoyed the same civil and legal rights. The initial residency requirement for citizenship was two years, later set at five years. No one coerced them to abandon their own culture, or even language.
In the 1830s began a great wave of immigrants, predominantly Germans and Irish. Trouble arose from the reality that “new” Americans were not immediately and might never be “real” Americans in the eyes of the “old” Americans. Increasingly, the “voluntary” Americans were drawn from countries where absolute monarchy prevailed. This included all those who belonged to the “absolute monarchy” of the Papal Catholicism.[2] Other American feared the United States would be swarmed by left-wing radicals in flight from more repressive regimes.
“Nativism” arose as a political force, culminating in the American or “Know Nothing” Party in the 1850s. They expressed Thomas Jefferson’s earlier fears that people raised under ana absolute monarchy could not learn how to participate in a democratic republic.[3] “Nativism” made impressive progress until swamped by the larger crisis of the Civil War.
After the Civil War, as any textbook will tell you, the country bounded forward in both industrialization and the exploitation of the Trans-Mississippi West. Vast amounts of natural resources (minerals, timber, grains and livestock) just needed manpower to put them to work. British, German, Irish (and French-Canadian in New England) immigrants poured in. Anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism revived, and a new anti-Socialism joined them as inspirations to immigrants. Then, in the 1880s, there began a tidal wave of “new immigration” from Southern and Eastern Europe. Poles, Russian Jews, Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and others arrived in huge numbers. Only the First World War (1914) paused most European emigration.
This latter immigration stirred bubbling cauldron of late-19th and early-20th Century social, economic, cultural, and political strife. Both “advanced” thinkers and organized labor championed the limits; but equivalent figures argued for inclusion over exclusion. The contest produced the first laws restricting European immigration (1923-1924). The laws have been revised on several occasions, but the United States has been a country of regulated and restricted immigration for a century. Recently, mass defiance of the law has combined with important political and economic forces turning a blind eye to the issue has made it an explosive problem.
So, we go back and forth in a debate that is ever-changing and ever-the-same.
See: Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted; Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door.
[1] Including those whose ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge when it was still above sea level.
[2] The “Syllabus of Errors” (1877) summed up more than a century of Papal anti-modern, anti-republican, and anti-liberal thought. “He was agin it,” as Will Rogers said of a fundamentalist Protestant preacher’s views on sin.
[3] Jefferson came down on both sides of many issues. This is one such.
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