Title: What did native-born Americans fear about immigration? - eNotes.com
Headings: What did native-born Americans fear about immigration?
Immigration and Nativism in the 1920s
What did native-born Americans fear about immigration?
Expert Answers
Further Reading
We’ll help your grades soar

Content: Many immigrants were Roman Catholics, and native-born immigrants tended to belong to Protestant churches. Many of these people believed that Catholics owed their primary allegiance not to the United States, but to a foreign Pope in Rome. This was a long-standing prejudice among American Protestants, but one that gained added traction in the midst of mass immigration, particularly from southern Europe. Nativism has been an aspect of American political life almost from the start. However, it only started to develop as a significant force around the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth. The population of the United States had risen dramatically, leading to the growing expansion of cities, in which immigrants tended to congregate. Tensions rose as white, native-born Americans accused immigrants of undercutting their wages and driving them out of a job. The various strands of nativism came together in the rebirth of the racist Ku Klux Klan in 1915, encouraged by the hugely popular movie Birth Of A Nation, a film that essentially rewrote American history and shamelessly glorified the Klan. In due course, nativism, and the pressures it unleashed, gave rise to the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration, especially from those parts of Europe with large Catholic and Jewish populations. It also stopped immigration completely from Asia and Africa.