How Have Attitudes Towards U.S. Immigration Changed?

Hostility to immigrants isn’t new to the United States. In 1896, Henry Cabot Lodge warned on the Senate floor that the “mental and moral qualities” of Americans would be endangered by the “wholesale infusion of races whose traditions … are wholly alien to ours.” In recent years, former President Donald Trump demonized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers and suspended immigration from several countries with predominantly Muslim populations.

Are either of these speakers representative of the broader opinion of their times?

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