America’s history of protesting the most recent immigrants

By Paul Metzger

Sunday, Sept. 14, 2014 | 2:02 a.m.

We like to say the United States is a nation of immigrants from everywhere who get along together, a melting pot that works. It’s partly hard-won truth, partly comforting national myth. (The riots in Ferguson, Mo., underscore the myth.)

Gingerly avoided are three immigration elephants in the room that we’d rather not think about: the almost 400,000 Africans brought here in shackles; the Native Americans forced on genocidal internal migrations; and the Japanese slapped into internment camps during World War II and stripped of their property.

But there are even larger numbers of other immigrants who have received a less-than-warm welcome.

On Aug. 11, a mob burned down the Catholic Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., just outside enlightened Boston. No, you didn’t somehow miss this on the news. It happened in 1834.

Violence against “the wrong kind” of immigrants blossomed in the 19th century. There was a major anti-Catholic riot in Bangor, Maine, again in 1834. Even earlier, Boston mobs in 1823, 1826 and 1828 attacked the homes of immigrant Irish Catholic laborers. Large crowds of rioters struck again with extraordinary violence in Philadelphia in May and July 1844, burning down three Catholic churches. It took the Army, with cannons, to restore order.

And it wasn’t just the Irish who were victims; German Catholics also came under attack in the 1840s and ’50s.

“Nativism,” the credo of America for native-born Americans, led in the early 1850s to the secret Know Nothing society (so called because members would say they “know nothing” about it.) They came out of the shadows as the American Party in 1855. Gone now, its spirit lingers on.

As ridiculous as it seems today, what the rioters and Know Nothings feared was increasing Catholic immigration would lead to control of the United States by the pope. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Irish feelings continued to be not-so-hidden factors in our nation’s politics until John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, when they were finally put to rest.

The Irish and German Catholics were followed by waves of immigrants from China from 1849 to 1882, and then millions of Italians, Slavs, Russians and Jews from 1880 into the early 20th century.

Italians were welcomed in New Orleans in 1891 with the largest mass lynching in the United States: 11 men were hanged and hundreds arrested on trumped-up charges. Eight years later, it happened again in Tallulah, La., when five Italians were lynched. Anti-Italian feeling was still very much alive in the late 1920s at the Massachusetts trials and executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

While there were laws in the 1700s about residency requirements for citizenship, there were no immigration statutes; we needed everyone we could get to settle the American continent. Though many were unwelcome, anyone could come. That is, until 1875.

That year, the Page Act, the first federal immigration law, responded to the growing number of Asian immigrants. It was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These began Washington’s efforts to quiet rising national fears of the “Yellow Peril.” The Chinese, much like today’s Muslims, were considered too different culturally to ever be assimilated.

The 20th and 21st centuries saw a flood of 23 other statutes that set up barriers to immigration and citizenship. Many were designed to ensure that “the character” of the United States wouldn’t change: white, Protestant, British and Northern Europeans were always to be the majority in America. It hasn’t worked.

In 2012, black, Hispanic, Asian and multiracial children were half of those younger than 5, and 37 percent of Americans were from these minorities. By 2010, Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii and the District of Columbia had become minority-majority jurisdictions. By 2043, it will be true of the entire country, and a declining population of whites will become a minority in the United States.

A lot of people see this tidal wave coming in less than 30 years and are consumed by the same fears that motivated the anti-Catholic, anti-Italian, anti-Eastern European and anti-Chinese protesters of our past.

We have about 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, a quarter of our 40 million foreign-born residents; the great majority of the 11 million are Hispanic. As the most visible segment of the minority explosion, Hispanics in general are on the receiving end of the loudest attacks.

The protests today are not aimed at them simply as Hispanics: That would sound too much like prejudice. “Legality” has now become the focal point, but it’s a euphemism for fear of fundamental social change.

The rallying cries today are “Secure the border,” (meaning the one with Mexico, not the one with Canada), and “No amnesty” (meaning don’t let all these Hispanics ever become citizens who might out-vote us). The recent arrival of 62,000 unaccompanied Central American “illegal children” provoked a protest storm that has undermined our reputation for compassion.

What present-day nativists really don’t like about Hispanic citizens, as well as immigrants, legal and illegal alike, and loudly refuse to accept, is the country’s unfolding reality.

Hispanics, already the country’s largest minority, together with other minorities, will inevitably have a dominant voice not only in many local and state governments, but the federal government, as well. When it happens, it will again demonstrate that the real genius of the American nation is the ability to successfully evolve while preserving our basic institutions.

Anti-immigrant protests are an integral part of America’s history. Like a virulent fever, they run through our country’s past and into our present. It’s an illness that has coursed through the nation’s body many times, until it finally passes. Then we shake our heads, bewildered, wondering how it could have happened, what it was all about.

While today’s fever grips us, it helps to remember that each time we’ve gone through this, we’ve come out a step closer to realizing that quintessentially American vision: a truly unified nation of immigrants.

Paul Metzger has taught strategic planning at Georgetown’s Graduate School of Foreign Service. He wrote this for the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va.