Each immigrant wave faced stigmatization as an un-American threat

Evidence

A century later, Arabs and Muslim Americans are the new “problem” of American society, but there have of course been others. Native Americans, labeled “merciless Indian savages” by the Declaration of Independence, were said to be beyond civilization and able to comprehend only the brute language of force. With the rise of Catholic immigration to the country in the nineteenth century, Irish and Italian Americans were attacked for their religion. They suffered mob violence and frequent accusations of holding papal loyalties above republican values. During World War I, German Americans were loathed and reviled, sauerkraut was redubbed “liberty cabbage,” and several states banned the teaching of German, convinced that the language itself promoted un-American values. Between the world wars, anti-Semitism drove Jewish Americans out of universities and jobs and fueled wild and pernicious conspiracy theories concerning warfare and world domination. Japanese Americans were herded like cattle into internment camps during World War II (as were smaller numbers of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian Americans). Chinese Americans were commonly suspected of harboring Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era, frequently losing careers and livelihoods. And Hispanic Americans have long been seen as outsider threats to American culture, even though their presence here predates the formation of the present-day United States. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 40

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pattern of nativist moral panics familiar from the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article on cross-cultural panic as identity signaling, though here it’s panics over religious/ethnic loyalty rather than dress. — connects to: Doubt about open mobility led Americans to scrutinize immigrants — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 213
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the recurring American ritual of declaring each new community ‘beyond civilization’ and the specific rhetorical template (labels, mob violence, language bans) repeated across groups.