No human being is illegal.

• Author: Zinn, Howard
• Position: Immigrants

Vigilantes sit at the border, guns on their laps, looking for those who might cross over. President Bush promises to send 6,000 National Guardsmen there and to build a wall. Archconservatives threaten to make felons out of the undocumented and those who help them. But immigrants from south of the border, along with their supporters, have been demonstrating, by the hundreds of thousands, for the rights of foreign-born people, whether here legally or illegally. There is a persistent sign: "No Human Being Is Illegal."

Discrimination against the foreign born has a long history, going back to the beginning of the nation.

Ironically, having just gone through its own revolution, the United States was fearful of having revolutionaries in its midst. France had recently overthrown its monarchy. Irish rebels were protesting against British rule, and the new U.S. government was conscious of "dangerous foreigners"--Irish and French--in the country. In 1798, Congress passed legislation lengthening-the residence requirement for becoming a citizen from five to fourteen years. It also authorized the President to deport any alien he regarded as dangerous to the public safety.

There was virulent anti-Irish sentiment in the 1840s and '50s, especially after the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, which killed a million people and drove millions abroad, most of them to the United States. "No Irish Need Apply" symbolized this prejudice. It was part of that long train of irrational fear in which one generation of immigrants, now partly assimilated, reacts with hatred to the next. Take Irish-born Dennis Kearney, who became a spokesman for anti-Chinese prejudice. His political ambitions led him and the California Workingmen's Party to adopt the slogan "The Chinese Must Go."

The Chinese had been welcome in the 1860s as cheap labor for the building of the transcontinental railroad, but now they were seen, especially after the economic crisis of 1873, as taking away jobs from the native born. This sentiment was turned into law with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, for the first time in the nation's history, created the category of "illegal" immigrants. Before this, there was no border control. Now Chinese, desperate to change their lives, tried to evade the act by crossing over from Mexico. Some learned to say "Yo soy Mexicano." But violence against them continued, as whites, seeing their jobs go to ill-paid Chinese, reacted with fury. In Rock Springs...