The Dark History of American Nativism
It was a lot of demographic change in a short period of time. The number of migrants coming into the United States annually had nearly quadrupled in less than a decade, and city and state officials were overwhelmed. Tasked with providing housing and schools to thousands of new people every year, along with adequate sanitation, police, fire, and transportation services, these officials could not keep up. Immigrants had taken to squatting in vacant lots, picking through garbage, and living in makeshift shanties on land that did not belong to them. Networks of ethnic gangs made up mostly or entirely of immigrants had also sprung up in some cities, engaging in illicit trade and filling hospitals and morgues with the casualties of their battles over territory and influence. Some Americans started to believe this violence was deliberate, part of a vast conspiracy organized by foreign nations looking to destabilize America by “sending their criminals and paupers to the United States.”
Safety, health, and educational challenges were not the only reason officials were concerned. America’s newest immigrants were also culturally different from the ones who had come before them; they had different values and different ideas about the obligations of government and the relationship between church and state. Many of them believed elected leaders were obliged to consult religious leaders before making decisions about civil law, an assumption that flew in the face of the First Amendment but was fundamental to the theological doctrines that had guided these immigrants before they came to America. “Those now pouring in upon us … are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect,” lawmakers in one state observed as they fretted about the possibility that democracy could be weaponized. If these recent immigrants became numerous enough, they could use the power of the ballot to replace the country’s laws with ones that advanced the “arbitrary” and “tyrannical” beliefs of their faith—a faith that denied the inalienability of individual rights, the premise of the American Founding.
If the situation described above sounds familiar, it should. Officials in border states like Texas and Arizona have been saying for years now that immigrants from Mexico and Central America are overwhelming their municipal infrastructures. The belief that many of these immigrants are violent criminals who’ve been offloaded to the United States by their home countries has been a part of our political rhetoric since 2015, when then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared immigration had become a threat because “when Mexico sends their people, they’re not sending their best.”
The belief that large numbers of Muslims from the Middle East might alter America’s legal landscape became a part of state and federal policy debates around 2011, when thousands of Syrian refugees, fleeing a civil war in their home country, began arriving in the United States. The concern has never completely gone away. “Politicians have imported millions of Muslims into our country,” one lawmaker recently lamented as he expressed support for a 2025 law that prohibits Muslims in Texas from creating their own housing developments and then insisting that the residents there follow the mandates of their faith. “They want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law,” the lawmaker claimed without evidence. “Not on my watch.”
But while the concerns about immigration described in the opening paragraphs of this article may seem recent, they are not. The allegation that foreign nations were sending “their criminals and paupers” to the United States was expressed by editors at the New York Observer in 1845. Those editors were responding to a government report that alleged “foreign parents” were migrating to New York City so that women could give birth there and then turn their infants over to the public almshouse, where they would be fed and clothed “at the city’s expense.”
The observation about the different “morals and intellect” found among America’s most recent immigrants came from a report released in 1848 by Massachusetts’s state senate. The immigrants the Bay State’s lawmakers were concerned about were not Muslim, however; they were Catholic. New England had become a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment, and many leaders believed they could legislate slavery out of existence—but not if loads of Catholics moved into the country from Ireland. Irish Catholics, these leaders believed (not without reason), voted the way their priests and bishops told them to vote, and the Catholic Church in the United States was not opposed to slavery. Many bishops actively supported it. Others said nothing at all about it. And the small number of bishops who did express reservations were concerned primarily about masters who abused the men and women they owned—not about the violation of natural rights and individual liberty that lay at the core of hereditary, race-based slavery.
Catholicism, after all—particularly before the Second Vatican Council brought changes to the Church in the 1960s—was not a faith that conceived of liberty as a natural right or an “individual” proposition. Freedom was not something a person was born with, as America’s Founders had insisted. It was something a person achieved with the help of the Church. Only when a man or woman finally understood the will of God could true freedom be attained, and Catholic leaders insisted that because of original sin, people could not understand the will of God on their own. They needed the guidance of bishops and theologians who had pondered the mysteries of Christianity for centuries.
All people needed this guidance—especially political leaders. This was the other reason Massachusetts’s lawmakers worried about the growing number of Catholic immigrants who were voting in the United States: their faith did not endorse a separation between church and state. In the words of one nineteenth-century pope, it was an “error” to believe that “the Church ought to be separated from the State.” Before Vatican II, the unabashed teaching of the Catholic Church was that “error has no rights.”
The belief that immigrants pose a threat to the United States is not new. In 1798, Federalists in Congress passed the Alien, Sedition, and Naturalization Acts, which gave the president the power to deport any foreigner he believed was dangerous and increased the residence requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years. The people Federalist lawmakers were concerned about were the French, whose pursuit of égalité—in the wake of the Reign of Terror just four years earlier—seemed radical and destructive even by the standards of a nation that had proclaimed that “all men are created equal.”
The aforementioned fears about Catholic immigration led to the creation of a new political party—the Native American or “Know-Nothing” party—that captured twenty percent of the seats in Congress in 1850 and pushed to have the residence requirement on citizenship extended to twenty-one years. Recognizing that most Catholic immigrants were fleeing poverty in Ireland, Know-Nothings pushed in 1855 for a law that would bar “foreign paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, the insane and blind persons” from entering the United States. The bill failed because Democrats insisted the federal government did not have the power to tell the states whom they could and could not accept as residents.
That party eventually reversed course. Fears about immigration’s impact on American culture became racial in 1882, when Democratic lawmakers in the West convinced Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigrants from coming to the country to work. This and a similar ban on Chinese women that was passed seven years earlier were the first federal restrictions on immigration, meaning that any American today whose ancestors came to the United States before 1875 cannot rightfully claim his or her ancestors “came here legally.” Before the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts, there was no “legal” or “illegal” immigration in America; people just came.
The Asiatic Barred Zone Act, passed in 1917, extended the ban on Chinese immigrants to include anyone living in a region that encompassed the modern-day countries of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. The Act also banned the kind of people Know-Nothings had tried to restrict back in the 1850s: “idiots,” “imbeciles,” “paupers,” “anarchists,” “persons who have been convicted of … a felony,” and “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority.”
Lawmakers had first proposed banning anarchists back in 1889, three years after a bomb that exploded in Chicago’s Haymarket Square was found to be the work of labor organizers with ties to anarchism. The effort to restrict the influence of anarchist and, later, socialist ideology on American culture was fortified in 1924 by the Johnson-Reed Act, which established annual quotas for nearly every country in the world on the number of people they could send to the United States. Those quotas heavily restricted immigrants from central and eastern Europe—most of them Jews and Catholics—since people from those parts of Europe were thought to be predisposed to radicalism. The Johnson-Reed quotas governed American immigration policy for the next four decades, including, unfortunately, the years leading up to the Holocaust, when thousands of Jews were desperate to escape central Europe.
As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. What are we to take away from this brief history of American attitudes toward immigrants and immigration? Should we focus on the fact that immigrants have continued to come to the United States—and thrive here—in spite of their demonization? Should we conclude that this demonization will always be with us? That Muslims and Central Americans may be in the crosshairs now, but that that will someday change? Six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court today are Catholic, after all (a development that would have terrified Know-Nothings in the mid-nineteenth century). And on St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish, not just the ten percent of the population that proudly claims that ancestry on census forms.
Or should we instead decide that we have had enough of these fears that always and never pan out? Immigrants do change American culture; that is a fact. But they have never destroyed it, and the change has always been a two-way street. It was American Catholic leaders like John Courtney Murray—a Jesuit theologian from New York City, born in 1904, the son of a Scottish immigrant and the grandson of Irish immigrants—who laid the groundwork for Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. After centuries of insisting that error had no rights, the Catholic Church finally affirmed that people have a right to realize their obligations to God on their own, free from outside coercion or influence. Ideas that Murray had articulated nearly twenty years earlier (and for which he was briefly silenced) helped the Church reach this conclusion.
For all its failures and drawbacks—and there are many—American culture’s focus on individual freedom is intoxicating and infectious. Our culture changes people when they get here. History has shown this. And in exchange, America has gotten friends, neighbors, co-workers, employees, guacamole, hummus, Christmas trees, basketball, and the occasional Nobel Prize.