h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Xenophobia is a fear of the foreign and the new.

Now that President Trump has created chaos at airports as he seeks to reduce the number of people from Islamic countries in the U.S., I think it would be good to consider how this squares with earlier attempts to keep foreigners away.

The Immigration Act of 1924 was one such attempt. Unlike Trump's executive order, this was an act passed by Congress. The Guide has no material on this act, so I am including a link to a website that gives some detail:
http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act

Reading between the lines, and using information I gathered when reading books about the run up to Prohibition, I would like to point out that restrictions on immigrants from Eastern European countries were dear to the hearts of leaders of the temperance movement. Letting in too many people form places where heavy drinking was part of the culture might put too many foes of prohibition into the cities, where they might amass enough voting power to lead to weakening of prohibition. Ha, ha, it was in vain anyway, as the blue bloods became the decisive bloc in the repeal of prohibition in the early 1930s!

As you read the above link, think about the liberal numbers of people allowed from Britain, based on so many Americans having had so many British people in their family trees. Asians? There were prohibitions early in the country's history, so the Asian population never got big enough to merit much representation in the immigration quotas.

Looking back at the attitudes of that era from almost a hundred years later, I wonder if anyone could think of such attitudes as sane? By 1952, immigration had been liberalized quite a bit. Nowadays, American seems like a benevolent host with outstretched hands.

Just remember, though, that xenophobia can rear its ugly head again with little or no notice.

But better it should be discussed in Congress, so that the whole society has a chance to weigh in, than that a single individual such as Mr. Trump should act as if he alone understood what the national interest consisted of. Such one-man rule hasn't occurred here since Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.

The horror, the horror!

You're probably right about this being the most extensive employment of executive orders since Lincoln. Although Harry Truman was pretty liberal with them.

Just for background, this Guide Entry appeared in December: A87877129

As the quotes I picked out to start with point out, banning 'undesirables' goes back to the 17th Century.

Prohibition was also seen as an anti-German move, because Germans frequented beer halls. And Italians drank wine, so there was that...pretty much everybody except, of course, the hillbillies, because those stills weren't going anywhere anytime soon...

The quota system was really annoying, but it led to some interesting demographics in times past.

There are a lot of Jews in Texas who apparently got there during a period when the quota system worked by ports. When the East Coast ports got full, the ship's captains went to the Gulf of Mexico. I know a rabbi whose grandparents landed in Galveston back in the day. So his family came from Odessa, TX.

I should have searched under "immigration" in the guide index

Massachusetts didn't want 'lame, impotent, or infirm persons'? Well, at least the impotent would not have passed their genes on to posterity .

My grandmother paid a price for marrying an immigrant: although born in the U.S., the law at the time of her marriage said that she had to take the nationality of her husband. She was not happy about having to apply for citizenship in the country she was born in.

Wow, I didn't know about that one. When was that law? And what did she have to do to reapply for citizenship, do you know? I won't ask what nationality she suddenly got saddled with...

I don't blame your grandmother: I would have been ticked.

I believe all of my x-great grandfathers were at one time not citizens - though nobody in my family hasn't been born here for at least 350 years. There was this business of being in rebellion against the government... At least, it says 'C.S.A.' on their grave markers.

My grandfather was Canadian by birth.

Oh, how horribly alien.

They worried about foreigners in the early 1920s. Seriously.