I found the below a couple years ago when I was first getting into anti-vigilante work. It's the intro section of something put out by the National Immigration Forum titled, "Cycles of Nativism in U.S. History." Food for though, I guess. Or at least a counterpoint to the bullshit 'once this country was great and only now is it full of inequality and bigotry' liberal crap. It's by no means perfect/ideal but a starting point - at least it was for me.
As a nation of immigrants, the United States has also been a nation of nativists. At times we have offered, in Tom Paine's words, "an asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty" from all parts of the world. At other times Americans have done the persecuting--passing discriminatory laws against the foreign-born, denying their fundamental rights, and assaulting them with mob violence, even lynchings. We have welcomed immigrants in periods of expansion and optimism, reviled them in periods of stagnation and cynicism. Our attitudes have depended primarly on domestic politics and economics, secondarily on the volume and characteristics of the newcomers. In short, American nativism has had less to do with "them" than us.
Fear and loathing of foreigners reach such levels when the nation's problems become so intractable that some people seek scapegoats. Typiclly, these periods feature a political or economic crisis, combined with a loss of faith in American institutions and a sense that the national community is gravely fractured. Hence a yearning for social homogeneity that needs an internal enemy to sustain itself: the "alien." Nativists' targets have reflected America's basic divisions: class, race, religion, and, to a lesser extent, language and culture. Yet each anti-immigrant cycle has its own dynamics.
ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS.Few immigrants arrived in the nation's infancy, but among them were European radicals who caused great alarm among the ruling Federalists. Worried that excessive democracy posed a threat to property and stability, the Adams administration regarded politically active immigrants as subversives, not to mention partisan adversaries--most were aligned with Jefferson's Democratic-Republican clubs. In 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, giving the President arbitray powers to exclude or deport foreigners deemed dangerous and to prosecute anyone who criticized the government(used mainly to imprison immigrant editors and pamphleteers). A new Naturalization Act sought to limit immigrants' electoral clout by extending the waiting period for citizenship to 14 years.
