Some interesting history, courtesy of Bill Bryson’s Made in America:
Quote: If one attitude can be said the characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now. For two hundred years succeeding generations of Americans have persuaded themselves that the country faced imminent social dislocation, and eventual ruin, at the hands of the grasping foreign hordes pouring through her ports.
…
In 1907, to give vent to the growing concerns that America was being swept to oblivion by a tide of rabble, Congress established a panel called the Dillingham Commission. Its forty-two-volume report concluded essentially that immigration before 1880 had been no bad thing – the immigrants, primarily from northern Europe, were (by implication) industrious, decent, trustworthy, and largely Protestant, and as a result had assimilated well – while immigration after 1880 had been marked by the entrance into America of uneducated, unsophisticated, largely shiftless and certainly non-Protestant masses from southern and eastern Europe. It maintained that the Germans and Scandinavians had bought farms and become productive members of American society, while the second wave merely soaked up charity and acted as a drug on industrial earnings.
As evidence the commission pointed out that 77 per cent of arrested suspects in New York were foreign born, as were 86 per cent of those on some form of relief. And the poor were not just overwhelmingly, but almost unanimously, of immigrant stock. When the commission investigators examined housing conditions in New York, they could not find a single case of white native American living in a tenement. The commission concluded that immigrants from southern and western Europe had increased overall unemployment and depressed wages.
In fact, all evidence points in the opposite direction. It was because America had a base of low-wage, adaptable, unskilled labour that it was able to become an industrial powerhouse. For over half a century American business had freely exploited its foreign-born workers, paying them appalling wages, dismissing them wholesale if they agitated for better pay or conditions, and replacing them with new supplies of compliant immigrants when necessary, and now it was blaming them for being poor and alienated. It failed to note that those who turned to crime or sought relief were only a small part of the immigrant whole, and that most were in fact loyal, productive, law-abiding citizens.
In other words, many of the same arguments heard 100 years ago are still being made.