It Was Never About the Immigrants

it's about racism

Frederick Douglass spent the years after the Civil War selling the country a hopeful story. He called it the Composite Nation. Immigrants were arriving by the millions, Irish and German and Chinese, and where others saw an invasion, Douglass saw a single people fused by a hunger for liberty, set against caste, inherited rank, and the divine right of kings. Americans, he said, shared “a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine-right government and privileged classes.” He believed this could be the first nation built on an idea instead of a bloodline. It was a generous thing to believe. It was also, to put it kindly, premature.

Premature, because the country had already built the machine that would prove him wrong, and it had been turning since the founding. The first Congress, in 1790, sat down to decide who could become a citizen. The answer it wrote into law was short: any alien who was a free white person. Not the enslaved. Not the Indigenous. Not, once they began to arrive, the Chinese. Race did not infect the immigration debate at some later date. Race was the cornerstone. Everything else got built on top.