Anti-immigrant sentiment had been prevalent in the United States since at least the 1840s. It had many sources. Nativists played on fears of violence and of the diversity of thought, belief, and custom represented by European radicalism and religion. Reformers blamed immigrants for municipal corruption. Workingmen's organizations claimed that immigrants kept wages low. Militant Protestants called Catholic immigrants pawns of Romanism. The popular press blamed them for political turmoil. Even those who sympathized with immigrants condemned them for their poverty and their peasant habits; housing reformers, for example, decried the unsanitary conditions of their overcrowded lodgings, which lacked plumbing and heating.
In the aftermath of the labor upheavals of the 1880s, nativism fed on fears of foreign-born radicals. Seven of the eight accused conspirators in the Haymarket affair of 1886 were immigrants. In response, the press spouted nativist rhetoric,
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Such tests would discriminate against peasants from eastern and southern Europe. Such laws, the platform claimed, would protect the United States by defending American citizenship and "the wages of our workingmen against the fatal competition of low-priced labor."
The idea of a literacy test had been advanced by the Immigration Restriction League, a forum for nativism founded in 1893 by a group of Harvard graduates from old Boston families. For them, the flood of foreign poor dramatized and symbolized the problems raised by the expanding urban working class. The League drew a line between "old" and "new" foreigners. Like many other native-born Americans, its members regarded the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as racially distinct from old-stock Anglo-Saxons. This distinction became the linchpin of the anti-immigration