Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the \u201chuddled masses\u201d\u009d emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.<\/p>\n
As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of \u201call men are created equal\u201d\u009d forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading \u201cNo Irish Need Apply\u201d\u009d? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.<\/p>\n
That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay\u2019s \u201cwall of brass.\u201d\u009d \u201cDon\u2019t fence me in\u201d\u009d might be America\u2019s unofficial anthem of unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, \u201cFence everyone else out.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n