What American history tells us about fear of immigrants

From the moment he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, Donald Trump has stoked fear of immigrants. He’s still at it.

In his campaign rallies these days, Trump rarely misses an opportunity to declare that immigrants are “animals” released from jails, insane asylums and mental institutions, and “stone cold killers” genetically predisposed to commit crimes while “poisoning the blood of our country.” Above all, they are incapable of assimilating into a democratic society.

History tells us that Trump is wrong. Again and again, immigrants, including those who arrived in America in desperate poverty, from very different cultures and societies, have overcome fearmongering, threats and violence to become accepted as productive American citizens.

Here are a few examples.

In the 1840s and 1850s, millions of immigrants arrived in America from Ireland, during and after the Potato Famine, and various German states. The Irish were stereotyped as heavy drinkers, prone to violence and content to live in squalor. And because the Irish (and some Germans) were Roman Catholics, they were denounced, as one city councilman from Brooklyn put it, for “blindness and ignorance that takes idolatry for religion and upholds a hierarchy which is now and ever has been corrupt and blasphemous.”

Anti-Catholic riots broke out in many cities. With a platform advocating draconian restrictions on citizenship for any person who swore allegiance to the Pope, the new American Party, also known as the “Know Nothings,” became a political force.

But in the face of these obstacles, Catholic and Protestant immigrants alike assimilated to their new national home. They became Irish Americans and German Americans, and led lives not much different from, and certainly not at odds with, the lives of those who called themselves “native Americans.”

And within a generation or so, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish xenophobia abated in the U.S. These days, the descendants of these immigrants are accepted and celebrated by their fellow citizens — including presumably Trump, whose forebears came to this country from Germany — as worthy members of the American family.

Ethnic tensions, however, regained their force at the end of the 19th century with the appearance of so-called “New Immigrants.” They were often derided as non-white, and they displayed an array of alien tongues, religions and customs: Roman Catholics again, from Italy, Poland and Hungary; Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians; and, more troubling still, Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe.  

Once again, native-born Americans reacted with fear and loathing. In “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy,” Lothrop Stoddard, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, proposed eugenics and birth control measures to stem the replacement of America’s legitimate population with alien hordes. Jews were increasing in such rapid numbers in New York City that a journalist wrote in Pearson’s Magazine, “that Gentiles will soon be on exhibition at the Bronx Zoo, where the children of Israel may regard them with curious eyes.”

Immigration restriction laws enacted in 1921 and 1924 all but closed off the Eastern and Southern European influx, leaving many wondering how to handle the millions who had already arrived. But fears of “replacement” all but disappeared, at least temporarily, through the process of assimilation. And Horace Kallen, John Dewey and Randolph Bourne — a Jew and two Protestants — introduced the concept of cultural pluralism. Society functions like an orchestra, Kallen wrote, in which “each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”

In time, the notion of a rich mosaic of cultures, each somewhat different and at the same time American, became a central tenet of the national creed. Today, Americans of all stripes dine at pizza parlors, Jewish delis and Chinese restaurants without a trace of the feeling that they are committing race suicide. And the Statue of Liberty reminds of the value of the allegedly “wretched refuse” from any “teeming shore.”

In the years since 1965, when a new law nullified the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, Americans have received and incorporated immigrants, a substantial percentage of them non-white, from many parts of the world, without provoking a significant xenophobic backlash. Immigrants from Vietnam, among others, have made a relatively smooth transition to American life. More recent arrivals, including many Muslims, seem well launched.

Some of these racial, ethnic and religious outsiders — as well as individuals and families seeking a better, safer life who have trekked to and across the Southern border — now face exclusion and deportation, advocated repeatedly by Trump. It is worth noting, in the context of Trump’s xenophobia, that the much-feared “hordes” of immigrants in the U.S. today constitute no larger a proportion of the American population than did the Irish and Germans of the 1840s and 1850s, or the New Immigrants of the early 20th century.

To no small extent, the 2024 election will determine whether current immigrants will be allowed to become Americans. One can only hope that our nation of immigrants will not ignore the lessons of history on Election Day.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Stuart M. Blumin is emeritus professor of history at Cornell.