Introduction

Abstract

“America, at its best, is a welcoming society. We welcome not only immigrants themselves but the many gifts they bring and the values they live by.” So said President George W. Bush at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens at Ellis Island in July 2001. The fifty million immigrants admitted legally to the United States in the twentieth century alone lends substantial credibility to Bush’s words and to the old adage that “America is a nation of immigrants.” Indeed, immigrants seeking their freedom and fortune and fulfilling the American dream have become part of the nation’s mythology. No symbol of this is more potent than the Statue of Liberty and no words more poignant than those of Emmas Lazarus inscribed upon it:

Give me your tired, your poor.

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teaming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And yet the history of immigration to the United States is far from unambiguously positive, as Bush’s “at its best” caveat recognizes. His qualification implies that Americans have ambivalent attitudes towards immigrants and immigration and that the broadly positive welcome afforded immigrants has been punctuated by a series of anti-immigrant episodes throughout American history.