Anti-Immigrant Bias in Colonial Times

Americans have been ambivalent about immigration since the nation’s beginning. Benjamin Franklin, before he signed the Declaration complaining about barriers to immigration, was complaining about immigrants. Germans, the doughty Pennsylvanian groused, were being allowed “to swarm into our settlements and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours.”

Spite toward newcomers with strange names and tongues and complexions has accompanied every peak period of immigration since. And each wave has taken much of the heat for whatever home-grown social problems they encountered.

Italians, President Herbert Hoover wrote in a note to a New York congressman, are “predominantly our murderers and bootleggers . . . foreign spawn (who) do not appreciate this country.” The congressman was Fiorello LaGuardia.

It might be noted that Hoover’s immigrant forebear, Andreas Huber, was one of the German-speaking “swarm” that so annoyed Benjamin Franklin.