If you listen closely to the modern discourse on immigration, you can hear the faint, ugly echoes of the past. The rhetoric deployed today by MAGA politicians and right-wing media is not a new strain of political thought. It is a rerun, a revival of the same nativist playbook that poisoned American public life a century ago. The targets have changed, but the script remains the same.

The argument is always presented as a novel crisis, a unique threat to the American way of life. But it is not. It is the same tired set of fears, repackaged for a new audience. To understand the anti-immigrant hysteria of today, one must first understand that we have been here before.

The Old Playbook: Defining the “Undesirable”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States was gripped by a moral panic over the “new” immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe, and Asia, that included Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese, and others. They were met not with open arms, but with a wave of hostility fueled by anxieties over jobs, culture, and religion.

The language used to dehumanize them is startlingly familiar:

  • They were “racially inferior.” Nativist organizations like the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League, founded by Harvard alumni, leaned heavily on the pseudoscience of eugenics to argue that these new arrivals from places like Italy and Poland were genetically “inferior stock” who would dilute the “superior American racial stock” of Anglo-Saxons.
  • They were criminals. Italian immigrants, in particular, were broadly stereotyped as “mafiosi, criminal-like and undesirable.” This culminated in one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history in New Orleans in 1891, after a local newspaper fanned the flames, describing Sicilians as having “low, receding foreheads, dark skin, [and] repulsive countenances.”
  • They were diseased and immoral. Immigrants were seen as a source of contagion and moral decay, a view that was used to justify their exclusion and exploitation.
  • They could not assimilate. A key argument was that these newcomers’ Catholic or Jewish faiths and their “strange and pagan rites” were incompatible with American democracy. The Dillingham Commission, a massive government study published in 1911, framed its entire report around the supposed threat these “new” immigrants posed to American culture, concluding they were a “serious threat to American society.”

This manufactured panic was not just talk. It led directly to brutal, discriminatory policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a precursor, but the anti-European sentiment culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924. This law was explicitly designed to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” It did so by creating a national origins quota system based on the 1890 census, a date deliberately chosen because it was before the major waves of Southern and Eastern European immigration. The result? Immigration from Northern and Western Europe was favored, while the door was often slammed shut on Italians, Jews, and Poles.

The Modern Echo Chamber

Now, listen to the rhetoric of today.

  • The charge of “racial inferiority” has been replaced with the slightly more polite, but equally loaded, language of “culture.” We are told that immigrants from Latin America or the Middle East lack the “cultural values” necessary for a democratic society.
  • The stereotype of the Italian mafioso has been replaced with the image of the “criminal alien” or the MS-13 gang member, used to paint millions of people as an invading force of violent thugs.
  • The fear of disease is a constant, from claims during the Ebola crisis to the broad-brush assertions that modern immigrants are bringing sickness across the border.
  • The fear that Catholics would be more loyal to the Pope than to America has been almost perfectly replicated with the fear that Muslim immigrants cannot be loyal Americans.

When Donald Trump speaks of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” he is not inventing a new line. He is channeling the eugenicist rhetoric of the early 20th century, which warned of “inferior stock” diluting the nation. When today’s nativists claim that immigrants are “invading” and refuse to assimilate, they are repeating the exact arguments made by the Dillingham Commission a century ago.

These parallels are not a coincidence. They reveal a deep, cyclical strain of xenophobia in the American character. It is a playbook that works by identifying a vulnerable “other,” stripping them of their humanity through stereotypes, and then using the resulting fear to justify discriminatory policy and consolidate political power.

History teaches us that this path leads to national shame and profound human suffering. We have seen what happens when we allow fear to write our laws. The question before us now is whether we have learned anything from our past, or if we are content to watch this ugly rerun to its tragic conclusion once again.