The fight over immigration: the presidential race has highlighted the long debate over immigration in the U.S. Why are we so divided?

• Author: Brown, Bryan
• Position: TIMES PAST - 2016 United States presidential election

At Donald Trump rallies, the call can come at any moment: "Build the wall! Build the wall!" the crowd chants. "We will build it," the Republican nominee for president replies. "And who's going to pay for the wall?" he prompts his audience. "Mexico!" the people roar.

Trump's promise to build a wall along the entire 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico has struck a chord with many Americans. They say the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.--many of them from Mexico--are taking American jobs and costing the U.S. billions of dollars annually in social services. Last year, in response to ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in the U.S., Trump also called for a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the country, arguing that there might be terrorists among them. More recently, Trump said he would ban immigrants from any nation that has been "compromised by terrorism."

Yet many Americans disagree with Trump's proposals. They say immigrants help grow the economy and that undocumented immigrants take low-paying jobs that no one else wants. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has pledged to fight for reforms that would give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. And many Democrats and Republicans believe, as Clinton has said, that a ban on Muslims "goes against everything we stand for as a country."

Such arguments may be making headlines, but none of them are new, says Roger Daniels, author of several books on immigration. He says Americans have had "a love and hate relationship" with immigrants since the nation's founding (see Timeline, p. 20).

George Washington & Ben Franklin

America's battle over immigration dates back to the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Among the document's grievances against Britain's King George III was that the king was "obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners"--preventing the colonists from attracting immigrants.

Naturalizing new arrivals was also on George Washington's mind when he addressed a group of Irish immigrants in 1783. The U.S. was open to "the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges," he said.

This was not just a matter of principle: It was necessary to America's survival. "The Founding Fathers had a big, vacant country," says Daniels. "Immigration was vital to help fill it up."

Even from the beginning, however, some Americans were suspicious of immigrants. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin warned fellow Pennsylvanians that German immigrants were "a colony of aliens [who] will never adopt our language or customs" and complained that "few of their children in the country learn English."

Franklin came to embrace immigration. Yet his words show that the question of who qualifies as an American has always been a subject for debate.

The nation's first census, in 1790, counted nearly 4 million people, mostly Protestant Christians of English, Welsh, or Scottish heritage. In the 1830s, newcomers began to arrive in great numbers: nearly 5 million people in 30 years. About a third of them were Irish--poor and Catholic. Nearly another third were Catholic Germans.

This alarmed some Protestants, who considered themselves the real Americans. Mobs periodically attacked Catholic churches or schools. Pamphlets circulated claiming that the Pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church, was trying to undermine American democracy. In 1856, the anti-immigrant "Know Nothing" party fielded a presidential candidate and won 20 percent of the vote.

For most of the 19th century, the U.S. government continued to encourage immigrants to fill the country's great spaces. In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which opened up huge territories west of the Mississippi River. Settlers were promised a plot of land if they lived on it for five years, and thousands of German, Scandinavian, and Irish families took advantage of the opportunity. "That's the way the Midwest got populated," says Daniels. It's also how Germans and Irish gained acceptance as Americans.

Chinese Exclusion

The Chinese had a harder time. In the mid-19th century, about 300,000 Chinese came to America--many settling in California, where they were eventually recruited to help build America's first transcontinental railroad. This influx of strangers inspired protests and local laws to "protect free white labor," as an 1862 California law put it. The backlash led to the Chinese

Exclusion Act of 1882, congress's first attempt to regulate immigration along racial lines.

By the 20th century, the tide of newcomers was only growing stronger. More than 27 million people entered the U.S. from 1880 to 1930. Many of them were Poles, Jews, Greeks, and Italians from Eastern and Southern Europe--people with strange new customs and languages.

This sparked growing, often racist, concerns about foreigners driving down wages or breeding crime. In 1921, Washington set the first immigration quotas. These restrictions, which favored Northern and Western Europeans, were designed to maintain the country's ethnic mix. They sharply reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the country.

It wasn't until the civil rights movement in the 1960s that many Americans recognized the quotas as discriminatory. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which officially ended the old quotas, "reclaimed the idea that America was a nation that welcomed immigrants," according to historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University in New York...