The deadly business of restricting immigration

Fears that the immigration of nonProtestant "lower races" would F weaken, if not destroy, America's moral fiber, prosperity and peace are as old as the Republic.

As the prolific author Harold Holzer tells us in Brought Forth on This Continent, his exhaustive account of Abraham Lincoln and 19thcentury immigration politics, Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts took to the floor of the newly established House of Representatives in 1797 to declare that he did "not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world" who might "come here with a view to disturb our tranquillity.” While xenophobia remains a constant in American life, antiimmigrant rhetoric often grows harsher, and campaigns to close the US border intensify, when more non-Protestant immigrants seek entry to America. From 1845 to 1854, famine and political turmoil brought almost three million European immigrants to these shores, the majority of them Irish and German Catholics. Some 400,000 people arrived in 1854 alone.

That year, secret societies of antiimmigrant, antiCatholic KnowNothings made their political ascent and scored huge electoral victories across the nation. (When asked what they were talking about in their meetings, the Know-Nothings routinely answered, "I know nothing.") Northern Know-Nothings were anti-immigrant and antislavery.