The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [12]
America’s traditional image as a nation of immigrants and a refuge for the downtrodden is well earned. The timeline of immigration to America in colonial times is famously marked with the arrivals of people fleeing intolerance and persecution—from the Puritans in 1620, to Lord Baltimore’s Catholics in 1634, to the first Jewish immigrants fleeing maltreatment in Brazil (1654), to the Quakers (1681), the Mennonites (1688), and the Huguenots (1685). And yet, almost from the beginning, Americans have exhibited mixed feelings toward those who came after them. In the late 1600s, popular prejudice drew official support when some colonial governments passed measures discriminating against Catholics and the Scotch-Irish (who originally had been brought into the colonies as servants):
“The common fear,” a Pennsylvania official explained, “is that if they [the Scotch-Irish] thus continue to come they will make themselves proprietors of the Province.”
In the early days of independence from Britain, the young United States of America had virtually no legal or bureaucratic barriers to immigration. (One reason for welcoming all was the practical fact that there were huge territories to settle and defend. The first federal census, in 1790, counted a total population in the young nation of only 3.2 million occupying more than 700,000 square miles of territory.) In 1793, President George Washington enunciated an “open-door policy” that resounded with the democratic idealism that Americans like to think of as a defining national characteristic: “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.”
By 1798, however, Congress had voted into law the oxymoronically titled Alien Friends Act, which empowered the president to deport any noncitizen who might be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” This was soon followed by the Naturalization Act, which established a hefty residency requirement of fourteen years for an immigrant to be eligible for citizenship. In 1801, though, after a power shift in Congress, the Alien Friends Act was allowed to lapse and the residency requirement for naturalization was shortened to five years.
The first enduring restriction on immigration came in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, spurred by lobbying from Western states, where Chinese immigrants had helped build railroads and mine the gold and silver fields. The law barred Chinese from entering the country for ten years (except for students, merchants, and children of Chinese-American citizens). Rather than only a decade, the prohibition on Chinese immigration stayed in effect until 1943.
Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was the only time in American history that an ethnic group or nationality was singled out to be prohibited from immigration, it was of course neither the first nor the last time that a minority was the target of open bigotry and hostility. For millions who have come to this country over the years and who are still arriving from around the world, the mystique of America as a land of opportunity and safe haven has been very much a reality. Unfortunately, though, along with the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, and the Chinese, successions of immigrant groups have experienced discrimination and violence in their adopted homeland.
Twenty-five years before signing the Declaration of Independence, no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin expressed unblushing antipathy toward German newcomers in Pennsylvania.