James David Nichols. The Limits of Liberty

The United States, unlike most nations, professes to be a nation of immigrants, yet it also tries to keep out as many immigrants, refugees, and asylees it deems undesirable, whether Irish Catholics in the 1850s, Chinese migrants in the 1880s, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the 1920s, undocumented immigrants from Mexico after 1965, and more recently migrants from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. As with past cycles, the recent eruption of anti-immigrant rhetoric and nativist politics has its roots in the nation’s founding, for it is an unassailable fact that white men established the experiment in republican self-government based on the presumption of white cultural and racial superiority over non-European peoples. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly restricted citizenship to “any Alien being a free white person” and offered European immigrants (regardless of religious affiliation) a “path to citizenship” after fulfilling a residence requirement and other qualifications. Native-born women were denied basic citizenship rights, as were indentured servants, enslaved persons, free blacks, Native Americans, and later Asians.

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