Early 1900s nativism ranked white immigrant groups into inferior castes.

Evidence

The tens of millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who came to work in American cities during the Industrial Revolution changed the demographics of urban life. In the 1890s, for example, nearly 70 percent of residents in the largest cities were Southern and Eastern European immigrants. By 1910, nearly 7 percent of the American population was foreign born, and by 1920, firstor second-generation immigrants made up nearly 25 percent of the population. A growing nativist movement maligned both waves of immigrants—from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia in the first and Italy and Russia in the second—as lower castes of Whites than the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s thesis that whiteness is a hierarchical ladder; ties to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ on how dress and culture mark internal caste boundaries. — connects to: Nativist elites split immigrants into salvageable and vicious categories to justify coercion and expulsion. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1538; 1880s nativism attacked immigrants indiscriminately, not by ethnic type yet. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 383; Early hostility to new immigrants was cultural contempt, not nativism — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 391