Lesbian or gay non-citizens trying to join their U.S. partners, and transgender people trying to see their relationships acknowledged, are caught between two forces: escalating panic about “porous” borders, and intensifying battles over the legal status of partnerships between people of the same sex.

These pincers convey an unmistakable message: You do not belong.  Yet neither ferocious anti-immigrant feeling, nor fear of sexuality and sexual “deviance,” is new in U.S. politics or society.  Nor is it novel for them to meet.

The United States has long been schizophrenic about its own immigrant identity.  In the nineteenth century, the U.S. had land, and needed labor.  Early immigrants such as the Irish might face invective and violence, but rarely had to hurdle major legal barriers at the ports where they disembarked.26 The numbers rose; their sources shifted, from northern to southern and eastern Europe.27  From 1860 to 1920, almost thirty million immigrants entered the country, invigorating every part of the nation’s life from literature to cuisine, infusing its culture with their cultures, increasing its population, wealth, and power. 28 Yet, hostility reared to meet them. In the 1880s, as Emma Lazarus famously imagined the Statue of Liberty offering luminous asylum to tired and poor beside the “Golden Door,” that anger showed ominous strength.

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The rage involved fears about reproduction: that newcomers—whom one politician called “the ignorant, lawless, idle and dangerous overflow of all other countries”29—would outbreed Anglo-Saxons.  It involved fears about gender: that promiscuous immigrant cultures would erode masculinity and femininity in the middle-class U.S. 

Fantasies about immigrants’ sexualities figured heavily in anti-immigrant prejudice—from pornographic imprecations against Irish convents as scenes for orgies30 to a lurid literature on “white slavery.”31  At the end of the nineteenth century, these bogeymen took on both legal and scientific garb. The 1875 Page Act was the first major federal measure restricting entry; prostitutes were a key category of “undesirables” it excluded, and sensational stories about sex workers from China led to further bans on Chinese immigration.32 Meanwhile, Francis Walker, an influential statistician and superintendent of two successive U.S. censuses, warned of “immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia” who “are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”33  Yet he saw weaklings paradoxically weakening their betters.  If the “older stock” of Americans lost ground to the invaders, it was because the latecomers actually caused a declining birthrate among the “native-born”:

The appearance of vast numbers of men … with habits repellent to our native people, of an industrial grade suited only to the lowest kind of manual labor, was exactly such a cause as by any student of population would be expected to affect profoundly the growth of the native population. Americans … became increasingly unwilling to bring forth sons and daughters who should be obliged to compete in the market for labor and in the walks of life with those whom they did not recognize as of their own grade and condition.34

The eminent sociologist Edward A. Ross, in 1901, called it “race suicide”:

There is no bloodshed, no violence, no assault of the race that waxes upon the race that wanes.  The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off from itself by collective action.35

President Theodore Roosevelt popularized these ideas and prophesied America’s eclipse through “the elimination instead of the survival of the fittest.”36

Such racist notions played on a distorted Darwinism.  Immigrants became a biological threat, defined by their prolific sexuality and perverse vigor. The emerging pseudo-science of eugenics—the belief that societies should keep the “unfit” from breeding—bolstered anti-immigrant sentiment.37  Not only the crude rural racists of the Ku Klux Klan, but urban intellectuals and self-styled progressives argued that immigration and immigrants’ reproduction had to stop.38  Yet underlying all these fears was a deep cultural pessimism, a foreshadowing of doom—ill-at-ease with traditional American optimism, but shared by powerful politicians such as Henry Cabot Lodge as well as writers like Henry and Brooks Adams.  One distinguished historian describes how the latter

used to greet each day by singing a song of his own invention, which consisted entirely of three repeated words: “God damn it! God damn it! God damn it!” For these gentlemen, history was indeed one goddamned thing after another—a steady spiral running downward toward the left, and culminating in some dark catastrophe—lava flowing through the streets of Quincy, or a tidal wave crashing upon Nahant, or a wild-eyed mob of Jews and Irishmen smashing in the doors of the Boston Athenaeum and scribbling madly in the margins of books.39

Groups opposing immigration spread and spawned: a “Race Betterment Foundation,” the “Committee on Selective Immigration,” a “National Committee for Mental Hygiene.”40 The word “hygiene” is suggestive. Immigrants were a racial peril, but also a menace to healthy masculinity, enervating men of the “native stock.”   As one congressman said in 1896, immigration restriction was needed “to preserve the human blood and manhood of the American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings.”41  The proximity of immigrants, with their exuberant, excessive sexuality, jumbled gender relations—producing an “impotent, decadent manhood.”42

One historian suggests that “Working-class and immigrant men, as well as middle-class women, were challenging white middle-class men’s beliefs that they were the ones who should control the nation’s destiny”:

[P]olitics had been viewed as part of the male sphere, as an exclusively male bailiwick… As immigrants wrested political control from middle-class men in one city after another, a very real basis of urban middle-class men’s manhood received both symbolic and material blows.  Immigrant men’s efforts to control urban politics were, in a very real sense, contests of manhood—contests which the immigrants frequently won.43

Madison Grant’s dire and popular 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, a kind of Brahmin Mein Kampf, mixed many of these themes, fulminating:

We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.  If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control …the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles.44

And sexual “deviance” came from without.  In 1907, a doctor wrote, “It scarcely needs to be mentioned that Americans frequently blame one or the other [immigrant] group for homosexuality.”45

A sweeping “red scare” took place in 1919-1920, when a federal attorney general and an ambitious aide named J. Edgar Hoover warned that anarchist immigrants intended revolution—and deported hundreds.  Existing fears thus drew new power from the specter of terrorism. From 1917, a new wave of laws restricted immigrant intake.  They culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924.  It clamped an overall numerical cap on immigration; national quotas within that figure were fixed according to percentages of national origin in the U.S. population.   The framers particularly meant to choke the flow from southern and Eastern Europe; immigration from Italy, for instance, plummeted more than twentyfold, from over 200,000 in 1921 to just over 8,000 in 1926.46  The act also effectively ended legal immigration from Asia. One triumphant nativist exulted at the time that it “marks the close of an epoch in the history of the United States.”47