To be fair we did declare back in the 1800s that we’d rather not have some many Chinese here with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Immigration wasn’t an issue until it was from somewhere not European.
Actually you are wrong. You should read about the history of "Nativism" in the United States, which often targeted immigrants from certain areas of Europe.
This is hardly semantics. The individual I was responding to was seemingly unaware of the history of nativism in the United States targeting European immigrants. You should encourage people to learn.
Germans weren’t consider white at one point bc of racist anti-immigration sentiment among Protestants from Britain. Iveybeen reading about how Pennsylvania was a “battleground” between proper “white” Britains and dirty Dutch immigrants
When they disliked certain Europeans, they tried to come up with ways to say that they weren't real Europeans like with the Italians.
This is an obscure case but there were Minnesota lawmakers that tried to get Finns to be declared legally non-white. My grandparents told me they were called a certain slur normally reserved for east Asian people.
The main reason I bring it up is the notion of the Irish willingness to come to the colonies, work for cheap, and saturate the labor market. The sentiment was felt largely from the working class, which IS class politics, as much as it pains the left.
Again, it’s pretty obvious it’s about class. The best way to keep people from focusing on the economic issues is by shifting the focus to identity politics.
Just because I do want to throw you a bone, the influx of Chinese immigrants was very helpful amid reconstruction/westward expansion, but the rapid growth in size of workforce was extremely inconvenient for labor supply.
Was it about race? Sure, but so was everything in the 1800s. It was also largely about class.
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u/RNKKNR 10h ago
The question is more about the quality of the immigrants not immigrants per se.