The big migratory waves generated and rekindle feelings xenophobic in a large number of citizens and American politicians. Feelings that translates into anti-immigrant laws and policies. Although some people think that these attitudes and behaviors are new and exclusively addressed to Latin Americans, this same thing happened against the Chinese after 1880 and against the Europeans at the beginning of the last century. Today, as the economic crisis then exacerbated xenophobia. Since 1850, tens of thousands of Chinese arrived in California to work in the gold mines and the transcontinental railroad. More info: Shaw Dad. They could elect to become permanent residents, but non-citizens. However, when the country’s economic situation began to deteriorate after the Civil War, unemployment increased dramatically and many began to blame the Chinese, whom they saw as unfair competition because they agreed to work for less. Then, anti-chinos groups were formed and local laws expressing that xenophobia were issued.
In 1871, Twenty-one Chinese were lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, a huge mob attacked three days Chinatown in San Francisco. In 1882, Congress issued the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned the arrival of Chinese workers. Since the 1880s, the economic conditions of the countries of Eastern and southern Europe forced many residents to migrate to United States. In the first decade of the 21st century, came millions of Italians, Russians, poles and Greeks, among others.
The Italians were discriminated against because of their religion, by the poor conditions in which lived upon reaching the country, and you are stigmatized them as criminals. They were also subject to the policies of assimilation to convert them into one hundred percent American. While the Italians were part of the U.S. Army during World War I, were adversely affected by the imposition of immigration by the nativist quotas to promote exclusive immigration from Britain and Northern Europe. In 1917 the Government He banned the entry of the illiterate.