The Nativist’s Response to Immigration Immigrants have been seeking salvation or just new opportunities in America for hundreds of years. Even Americans originally started off as immigrants. They came to settle in this New World to seek opportunities. These types of immigrants were white, strong, leaders and felt they were superior. In the mid nineteenth century, the “new” immigrants were also welcomed. According to President Grant, these “new” immigrants were the weak, broken, and crippled people who had nowhere else to go. Grant thought these “new” immigrants would ruin the tone of the American life into a more vulgarized tone now that these immigrants are filling up the jails and asylums (Document 4). They mostly came from …show more content…

He blamed immigrants on the lack of holiness in the Sabbath and how it is now a holiday. He also blames the liquor traffic on the immigrants too (Document 2). Whether the immigrants came to America or not, these problems would still be here. It’s human instinct to attack a different race or religion when a problem comes about. That is exactly what the Americans were doing to the immigrants. There was always a large amount of immigrants arriving into the United States. The greatest danger of unrestricted immigration is that the immigrants can overrun the master race and they can have more control then the Americans (Document 5). When a lower race mixes with a higher race in sufficient numbers, history proves that the lower race will prevail. If the Americans continue to let unrestricted amounts of immigrants enter the United States, their thoughts and believes would soon alienate the Americans and the Americans would soon become the strangers in their own country (Document 6).
Once Americans began accepting that there is no way to completely stop the flow of immigrants into America, they began to find ways to limit the amount arriving. In 1921 the National Origins Act was put into effect. It looked at the immigration record to find a base year. They looked at the year that the fewest immigrants arrived and called that the base year. They used the base year as the quota for immigrant arrival. Illegal immigration continued and