The Americas went for over 350 years (from 1500 to 1850) before there existed any kinds of controls on immigration.
Americans have only ever been afraid of "uncontrolled immigration" when it was non-white immigrants. It was for racist reasons that we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it's for racist reasons now.
> Americans have only ever been afraid of "uncontrolled immigration" when it was non-white immigrants.
This is racist revisionism.
There was plenty of dislike of white migrants as well, eg, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, etc all received ethnic hatred at various periods.
> it's for racist reasons now
Believing that all nationalism is racism is ideological nonsense meant to poison the well, rather than address serious challenges to your ideology and the impact it has on cultures and human flourishing.
Sure, that would be a ridiculous thing to say, which is why I didn't. If I meant "every person who is opposed to immigration is fuelled by racial hatred," I would have said that. I thought that a good-faith reading was one of the rules of HN?
If you look at the times when anti-immigrant sentiment is highest, whether via popular opinion or governmental action, it directly corresponds to when Americans were the most racist about the arriving immigrants.
Americans have only ever been afraid of "uncontrolled immigration" when it was non-white immigrants. It was for racist reasons that we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it's for racist reasons now.