Nativism and Exclusion

Between 1865 and 1898 immigration surged, and so did organized resentment of it. On the West Coast, white workers blamed Chinese laborers, who had built much of the transcontinental railroad, for depressing wages. That pressure produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned nearly all immigration from China and barred Chinese immigrants already in the country from becoming naturalized citizens. Earlier laws had excluded individuals for traits like criminal records or disease. This law excluded an entire nationality by name, a new kind of discrimination written directly into federal law. Enforcement happened at ports like San Francisco, where officials demanded documentation and interrogated Chinese arrivals, including people with a legal right to enter, under suspicion that papers were forged.

In the cities where European immigrants landed, informal power filled gaps that government did not. Political machines like Tammany Hall in New York traded jobs, legal help, food, and coal for votes, giving immigrant communities a practical safety net and a path to local influence that official institutions rarely offered. This is also why the melting pot image misleads: immigrants did not simply dissolve into one culture. They clustered in ethnic neighborhoods, kept languages and churches, and built mutual aid networks and machine ties, a mosaic more than a melted blend.

After 1890, immigration shifted toward southern and eastern Europe, people nativists saw as racially and religiously different from earlier arrivals. This new immigration peak sharpened nativist pressure and fed calls for broader restriction, arguments that would carry into literacy tests and quota laws in the next period.