Reporting: Immigrants

Outrage concerning immigrants in the United States began after independence, and probably well before 1802, the year of this collection's first article. The argument laid out in an anonymous letter to the Lancaster Intelligencer was economic: immigrants would compete for jobs and threaten the livelihoods of the citizens, whose families should enjoy the privileges that came with stepping ashore at an earlier date. It seems a self-evident argument and hard to refute, until one considers the p...