Immigrant Bashing: An American Tradition

Lady Liberty aside, America has never welcomed immigrants. Not any group of huddled masses. Not even other Europeans. Certainly not the French and Irish who came after the ink was barely dry on the Declaration of Independence. The Congressional response to their arrival: The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, which mandated a 14-year residency requirement for citizenship. It was later repealed.

When masses of starving Irish immigrants fled here in the 1840s after the island’s potato crop was destroyed by a blight, anti-Irish groups called for quotas on immigration and longer residency requirements. When the non-English speakers (Germans, Italians, Chinese, Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans) flooded into Ellis Island and elsewhere, the country responded with discrimination and anti-immigrant legislation. “No Irish Need Apply” signs in shop windows became “No Italian Need Apply.” In 1882, Chinese workers became the first ethnic group to be officially excluded by law.

Other ethnicities were regarded as undesirables. For years it was feared that Southern Italians would topple Anglo-Saxon culture with our wild Latin ways. We weren’t considered the inheritors of Roman civilization, Northern Italians were. Leta Hollingworth, well-known author and professor at Teachers College at Columbia, characterized Italian children as having “a low level of intelligence.” The American Eugenics Movement proposed to sterilize Italians and others (including Jews and Slavs) to keep them from reproducing. Neither the Italians nor the Irish were seen as white, but as separate races from Northern Europeans.

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