Isolationist Sentiments and Illegal Immigration

From The Wall Street Journal:

Hostility toward immigrants has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history. At the turn of the 20th century, restrictionists denounced Italian and Eastern European immigrants as crime-prone, diseased and unable to assimilate. After isolationist sentiments flared during World War I, nativists in Congress pressured President Warren G. Harding into signing the first immigration Quota Act in 1921. The law effectively ended the open-door policy that had allowed millions of foreigners to settle in the U.S. in the previous decades. The National Origins Act of 1924 further stymied the flow, and the impact lasted for decades -- the stanched flow of immigrants to the U.S. did not pick up again until the 1960s.

Today's debate is partly a reaction to the fact that the U.S. is now home to more than 35 million immigrants, an all-time high in absolute numbers, scholars say. The density of the foreign-born population -- almost 13% of the total -- is approaching the 15% peak reached in the last massive wave of immigration from the 1880s to 1920s, according to scholars who study immigration. "In the last two years nativism has become as intense as it was during its last peak, the 1920s," says Gary Gerstle, an immigration historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

The current wave of immigration has reached pockets of the country untouched by immigration for decades, and the fact that a huge number of the immigrants -- 12 million -- are here illegally further inflames passions.