Despite being a nation of immigrants, the United States has also been a nation of nativists. At times we have offered, in Tom Paine's words, "asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty" from all parts of the world. At other times, our country has persecuted others: passing discriminatory laws against the foreign-born, denying their fundamental rights, and assaulting them with mob violence, even lynchings. We have welcomed immigrants in periods of expansion and optimism and reviled immigrants in periods of stagnation and cynicism. Our attitudes have depended primarily on domestic politics and economics, secondarily on the volume and characteristics of the newcomers. In short, American nativism has had less to do with "them" than us.

Fear and loathing of foreigners becomes more common during periods of political and/or economic crisis, as people seek a scapegoat to blame for problems. The "alien" immigrant can be an easy target for blame. Nativists' targets have reflected America's basic divisions: class, race, religion, and, to a lesser extent, language and culture. Yet each anti-immigrant cycle has its own dynamics.

ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS. One early wave of U.S. immigrants were European radicals, who caused great alarm among the ruling Federalists. Worried that excessive democracy posed a threat to property and stability, President Adams’s administration regarded politically active immigrants as subversives, not to mention partisan adversaries —most of these immigrants were aligned with Jefferson's Democratic-Republican clubs. In 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, giving the President arbitrary powers to exclude or deport foreigners deemed dangerous and to prosecute anyone who criticized the government (used mainly to imprison immigrant editors and pamphleteers). A new Naturalization Act sought to limit immigrants' electoral clout by extending the waiting period for citizenship to 14 years.

PROTESTANT CRUSADE. Immigration grew sharply in the 1830s-40s with the arrival of many Irish and Germans, who were largely Roman Catholic. Simultaneously, a Protestant revival flourished in a climate of economic change and insecurity. Evangelists demonized Catholics as immoral "Papists" who followed authoritarian leaders, imported crime and disease, and stole native jobs. Protestant workingmen burned the Ursuline Convent near Boston and rioted in several cities. Thirty people were killed and hundreds injured in Philadelphia in 1844. By the mid-1850s, the nativist American Party won six governorships and controlled legislatures in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and California. They enacted numerous laws that penalized immigrants (as well as newly annexed Mexicans), including the first literacy tests for voting, which disfranchised the Irish in particular. Attacking the "un-American" foreigner served as a diversion for those unwilling to acknowledge America's irreconcilable difference of slavery versus abolition, an issue that split nativists. As sectional conflict sharpened, the American Party virtually collapsed by 1860.

CHINESE EXCLUSION.  Nativists in the West singled out Chinese immigrants for violence and legalized discrimination, claiming that white wage-earners could never compete with so-called "coolies" willing to live in squalor. The nativist Workingmen's Party led a movement for a new state constitution in 1878-79, adopting provisions to ban Chinese from employment by corporations or state government, segregating them into Chinatowns, and seeking to keep them from entering the state. One delegate to the constitutional convention summed up the prevailing mood: "This State should be a State for white men . . . We want no other race here." Under pressure from California and other Western states, Congress passed the nation's first wholesale immigration restriction, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 

RETURN OF ANTI-CATHOLICISM.  The increasing divide between the rich and poor during the post-Civil War era set the stage for class conflict between unregulated capitalists and a militant labor movement led largely by immigrants. Amid violent strikes of the 1870s-80s came predictions of an apocalyptic struggle between American democracy and the forces of European socialism. The American Protective Association organized as a secret society dedicated to eradicating "foreign despotism," targeting Catholics. One of its campaigns sought to ban German-language instruction, then widespread in the Midwest, as a way to harass parochial schools. But the idea backfired after Illinois and Wisconsin adopted such laws in 1889, prompting immigrant voters to turn incumbent Republicans out of office.

AMERICANIZATION CAMPAIGN.  By the turn of the century, public attention began to focus on poverty, disease, and crime rates of immigrant ghettos, as well as the cultural distance between newcomers and native-born. Around 1890, fewer immigrants came from Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia as more arrived from Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and Russia. In 1911, a federal commission issued a 42-volume study of the foreign-born population, alleging that the new immigrants were less skilled and educated, more clannish, slower to learn English, and generally less desirable as citizens than the "old immigrants." A campaign to “Americanize" these Eastern and Southern European immigrants began in an attempt to change their cultural traits, civic values, and especially their languages. The U.S. government's Bureau of Americanization encouraged employers to require English classes for foreign-born workers. Most states banned teaching in other languages. Some even prohibited foreign language study in elementary grades.

TRIUMPH OF ANGLO-SAXON RACISM.  Labor strife following World War I, often led by foreign-born activists, brought on a backlash against immigrants. This backlash culminated in the Palmer Raids of 1920, in which the FBI deported "alien subversives" without trial . The prevailing attitude was that Eastern and Southern Europeans were genetically inferior, therefore they could not and should not be assimilated. Anglo-Saxon heredity was credited for the American genius for self-government. New immigrants were seen to threaten American democratic institutions and way of life. Congress embraced this reasoning in 1921 and 1924 legislation that created the national origins quota system.

ENGLISH ONLY MOVEMENT.  An end to racial quotas in the 1965 Immigration Reform Act opened the United States to Third World peoples and brought an explosion of demographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Americans who felt unsettled by these changes found a symbolic target for their discontent: "bilingualism." In the early 1980s, nativists launched a movement to restrict the language of government--and, in some cases, the private sector--to "English only." The campaign won broad support, but the legislative means were punitive, serving to restrict essential rights and services in other languages, from emergency telephone operators to driver's license exams.

CALIFORNIA SETS A NATIVIST TREND.  In the early 1990's, America entered another period of anti-immigrant activism, with increasing complaints about the “costs” of diversity. The political conditions driving the new nativism were historically familiar: economic stagnation (in California), a widening gap between rich and poor, concerns about crime and moral breakdown, rising racial tensions, and widespread cynicism about social and political institutions. Anti-immigrant activists successfully capitalized on public fears . In California, voters approved Proposition 187, which would have forced public agencies, such as schools, law enforcement, social service agencies, and health care facilities to determine the immigration status of those they serve (or arrest), deny services to those they suspect (or confirm) are undocumented, and report them to the former INS. The initiative was tossed out by the courts. However, Congress enacted sweeping legislation to toughen immigration enforcement laws and cut government benefits to non-citizens. The nativist successes spurred a backlash among new Americans. Naturalization rates reached historically high levels, and new Americans voted in record numbers.

NATIVISM IN THE NEW MILLENIUM.  The 2000 Census confirmed America's unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity. After years of sustained economic growth, many Americans now feel comfortable with this diversity. But others, reacting to immigrants who have bypassed traditional gateway cities to settle in traditionally white rural and suburban communities, are uncomfortable with the changing demographics. Anti-immigrant groups have capitalized on this discomfort with negative advertising, sometimes targeting pro-immigrant politicians. Meanwhile, as the birthrate of natives declines, the economic well-being of cities and states becomes increasingly reliant on the influx of new immigrants. Census data confirmed that cities where immigrants settled grew and prospered, while others were left scrambling to find ways to attract newcomers. Nativists, reacting against increased immigration, point the finger at immigrants for suburban sprawl and environmental degradation. After September 11, 2001, anti-terrorism legislation has also targeted immigrants. [See Lesson Eleven for more information about recent anti-immigration law and policy.]

Sources: David Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Ellis Cose, A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America (New York: Morrow, 1992). James Crawford, Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of "English Only" (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992). Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1950 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957). John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The National Immigration Forum, 2003. The Close-Up Foundation. Spartacus Educational Website.