An Inhospitable Nation: Demography, Politics, and the Failure of Restrictionism in America

The paper examines the reaction of the American people to immigrants across the long history of foreign arrivals.  Political texts, worker surveys, congressional voting, and opinion polls demonstrate the consistent antipathy on the part of the native population to immigration, from the colonial period to the present.  Demographic data drawn from samples of the U.S. Census and other sources from 1850 to 2007 show that antipathy changed to hostility at moments of major demographic shifts in the volume and ethnicity of arrivals.  These demographic factors should be the starting point for understanding major restrictionist movements, rather than the attitudinal characteristics usually favored in scholarly accounts, such as religious bigotry, racism, provincial consciousness, elite manipulation of the populace, and so forth.  Despite strong popular opposition to high levels of immigration, policy almost always reflected the views of the minority that favored heavy immigration. As Gary Freeman and Carolyn Wong have shown for the contemporary United States, the failure to implement popular will on immigration resulted largely from a two-party system in which each party had an interest in maintaining open doors.  In moments of crisis, as in the present, the lack of agreement between parties and the electorate led to the latter’s recourse to means outside the two-party system and the development of radical anti-immigrant movements.