Road to the Midterms: Can Immigrants Ever Be Real Americans? By Zac Christian

“Immigrants are determined that neither themselves nor their children shall ever conform to American manners, American sentiments, or the spirit of American Institutions.”

“Their religion seeks to destroy all individual liberty, all private judgment, all power on the part of man to think or to act for himself.”

“Immigrantion represents the chief source of crime in this country.”

“If these disgraceful outrages are looked into, it will be found that the perpetrators are FOREIGNERS, in nine cases out of ten.”

^{“The enormous influx of foreigners will in the end prove ruinous to American workingmen, by REDUCING THE WAGES OF LABOR to a standard that will drive them from the farms and workshops altogether, or reduce them to a condition worse than that of slavery.” 1}

Debates over immigration—both legal and not—have reached a fever pitch over the past year. Just like in the quotes, supporters of the current administration’s crackdown on undocumented aliens in the U.S. always point to these issues.

Resistance to assimilation. Dangerous beliefs. Criminal natures. Disgraceful outrages. Threats to jobs.

^{Arguments often boil down this core idea: we live in an unprecedented period of immigration that threatens the heart of American society. The only way to protect the United States is to embrace nativism, an ideology that “prioritizes the interests and well-being of native-born residents of a given country over those of immigrants.” 2}

Except... none of those quotes were arguing in support of Trump or ICE. In fact, none of those authors had ever even heard of Trump or ICE.

Because they’re all from the 1850s.

The writers were not warning about the so-called “dangerous” immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia that are targeted today. Instead, their greatest worry was about people from Catholic Ireland.

Today, millions of Americans celebrate their Irish heritage with pride. 200 years ago, millions of Americans believed that the Irish were fundamentally anti-American and could never be anything but a threat to the U.S.

To “protect” their country, these anti-immigration activists formed their own political organization called the American Party. They are better known as the Know Nothings, because members always said “I know nothing” when asked about the party.

^{The American Party believed in maintaining what they considered a pure and united society. After Ireland’s potato famine began in the 1840s, waves of Irish emigrants left their homeland for the United States. The Know Nothings perceived this as an invasion. They claimed that Europe was “dumping” its “criminals and paupers” who were “too lazy to work” on the “poor, good-natured Americans.” 3}

^{On George Washington’s birthday in 1856, Know Nothing leader Daniel Ullmann claimed that the only way to solve the problem was to use force on the immigrants. If the United States was to stay true as a nation with “an organized individuality, self-reliant and self-existent,” then the country needed “a great central dominant race, with sufficient vital power to mold and absorb all the rest into one homogenous national body.” 4}

To hammer home his point, Ullmann pointed to Russia as a mirror of what the U.S. should strive for. By the 1850s, both nations had embarked on an industrializing mission, and Ullmann correctly foresaw a future where Russia and the U.S. would eventually stand supreme in the world as the two rival superpowers.

^{He both praised and warned against the eastern empire’s strength, especially a key “element of national power, unsurpassed—a homogenous people.” Millions upon millions of Russians shared the same language, religion, ethnicity, and history. They were “penetrated with the same with the same national sentiment” that made them “look up with intense devotion and affectionate reverence to their supreme head, the Czar.” 5}

^{Ullman warned that the combination of autocracy and national unity would make Russia a mighty foe. He argued that if the U.S. wanted to both compete and maintain its democratic republic, it had to embrace the “unquestionable” truth that “the American family is essentially of the Anglo-Saxon.” Only White Protestants of English heritage could embody America’s “strong feeling of personal liberty and individuality, its indomitable courage, its comprehensive spirit of enterprise, and its inflexible determination of character.” 6}

Yet many Americans resisted the Know Nothings.

Americans like Abraham Lincoln.

^{Five years before his election to the White House, the future president declared “I am not a Know-Nothing.... How could I be?” He openly wondered “how anyone who abhors the oppression of [enslaved Blacks], be in favor of degrading” immigrants? Though our nation began with the words “all men are created equal,” Lincoln warned if “the Know Nothings gain control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except [Blacks], and foreigners, and Catholics.’” Should that happen, he would “prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” 7}

Lincoln’s views ultimately won out in the next few years, largely thanks to the Civil War. The Know Nothings took off at the same moment as the final debates over slavery. As Americans began fighting and killing each other as members of “Free” and “Slave” states—including millions of immigrants serving in the Union Army—their worries over nativism and immigration faded into the background.

Faded, but not disappeared.

After the Civil War, the old arguments of nativism combined with anti-Black racism. Millions of formerly enslaved men and women entered free society and fought for their full rights as American citizens, taking part in the broader struggle for national inclusion. Millions of former enslavers rejected a multi-racial society and fought to deny both Blacks and immigrants status as “real” Americans.

Those attitudes led to Jim Crow segregation.

Those attitudes led the Ku Klux Klan to commit terrorism against Black, immigrant, and Catholic communities.

Those attitudes led to the 1924 Immigration Act, a law severely limiting immigration from anywhere but northwest Europe; a law that ended simultaneously with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Americans today are experiencing nothing new with these fears of the “other.” This has been a constant theme in American history, stretching back even to the Founding Fathers in the 1780s. There’s also nothing new in the passion that both pro- and anti-immigrant sides take in their beliefs. Each side even continues to use the same language and arguments to support their stances.

It remains for us to decide which version of past Americans we want to be. Are we to follow the example of the Know Nothings, or of Abraham Lincoln?

We the people of the United States will decide this issue and many others as we head down the road to the midterms.

Notes:

1 Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 107-109, 113.

2 August Samie, “nativism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 19, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/nativism-politics. Accessed March 7, 2026.

3 Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, p. 108.

4 Daniel Ullmann, “The Course of Empire: An Oration delivered before the Order of United Americans, at the Academy of Music, New York, February 22d, 1856, on the celebration of the Birthday of Washington” (Bro. William B. Weiss, Printer, 1856), p. 8.

5 Ullman, “The Course of Empire,” p. 16.

6 Ullman, “The Course of Empire,” p. 20.

7 Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Joshua Speed: August 24, 1855,” Abraham Lincoln Online, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm. Accessed March 7, 2026.