Today it’s hard to even imagine that Americans once despised Irish-Catholics, especially since we’re less than a month away from celebrating St. Patrick’s Day — where every American gleefully wears green and boastfully claims that, yes indeed, they are in fact part Irish.
It’s easy to pretend that nativism is an idea exclusively held by a small, undereducated population, but political xenophobia doesn’t restrict itself to just one particular demographic group. It was only a few decades after the Know-Nothings failed to gain the presidency, in 1894, that a group of Harvard grads successfully limited immigration and revived nativist sentiment by creating the Immigration Restriction League, which was built on the popular assumption that immigrants were the cause of many of society’s common woes such as overcrowding, crime, and labor-related disputes.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Because it’s 2016, and in the United States of America — a country where 99 percent of the population can directly trace their heritage back to either an immigrant, slave, or refugee — the political vitriol of nativism is back and stronger than ever.
