"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," said Lady Liberty in the first half of the 19th century. (Well, she wasn't built yet, and Emma Lazarus hadn't written that poem yet, but that was America's attitude.) Pretty sweet deal for those huddled masses.

By the end of the century, she changed her plaque to say, "LOL, nope. There's like a billion of you, forget that." We're paraphrasing, but the United States wasn't exactly rolling out the red carpet for newcomers a century ago. 

After the Civil War ended, immigration sped up. (It was a lot more attractive to move to the United States when Americans weren't busy, you know, shooting each other.) Now that the country was having another Industrial Revolution, why not have another big wave of immigrants as well? History likes to keep things predictable.

Just to throw in a little curveball, though, this round of immigrants weren't as often of Irish or German background. In the 1870s and beyond, the new wave of immigrants came largely from Eastern or Southern Europe. We're talking people of Czech, Russian, Polish, Croatian, Italian, and Greek descent coming into the United States on the East Coast, and a good amount of immigrants on the West Coast coming from Asia. As immigration increased, so did the fear and hatred of immigrants. Voters asked the government to step in, and it definitely did.

That open gate to the United States? Americans slammed it shut.

In 1882, for the first time in American history, Congress passed a law that restricted free and open immigration into the United States at the federal level. The Statue of Liberty wasn't standing guard in New York Harbor quite yet, but if she were, she would have dropped her torch and started shooing people away.

That first act was the Chinese Exclusion Act. (Pssst: we've got an entire learning guide on it.) It specifically barred Chinese immigrants (obviously) from entering the United States, becoming citizens, or coming back if they had to leave the country. Subsequent legislation excluded foreigners from many other countries. 

It's nothing personal, China. We were totally planning on keeping everyone else out, too.

By the 1920s, American immigration policy evolved into a nakedly discriminatory ethnic quota system, allowing most Northwestern Europeans to enter freely while strictly limiting the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans and excluding Asians entirely. Despite the increasingly stringent controls imposed upon American immigration between 1882 and 1952, the period still witnessed the largest immigration surge—relative to the overall population at the time—in American history.

And contrary to the fears of many native-born Americans of the era, the so-called "new immigrants" of the late-19th and early-20th centuries did not, in the end, undermine American culture and society. Indeed, by the time the quota system imposed in the 1920s reduced the "new immigration" to a trickle, it had begun to become clear that the "new immigrants" were acculturating to American society just as fully as their "old immigrant" predecessors. 

Czechs and Poles and Jews and Italians made just as good Americans as had Germans and Englishmen. E pluribus unum.

Immigrants pour across America's borders in unprecedented numbers. They settle in overcrowded, ethnically ghettoized urban communities where the English language is rarely heard or spoken. They work in jobs offering brutal labor conditions and terribly low pay. Foreign-born radical activists stir up social and political discontent.

Anxious native-born American citizens, reduced to a demographic minority within their own cities, clamor for government action to stop the immigrant influx. Their fears of the impact immigrants have on American society sometimes morph into ugly racial and ethnic resentments. Conflicts over immigration threaten to tear this self-proclaimed "nation of immigrants" asunder.

And through it all, new immigrants continue to pour into the country, thousands of them arriving every single day.

If these sound like stories ripped straight from the headlines, they are. 

But they're not from the Fox News website or Lou Dobbs Tonight. No, these are the headlines that dominated American newspapers in 1882, 1901, 1917, and 1924. For nearly 50 years, spanning the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the greatest wave of immigration in the history of the United States transformed American society and roiled American politics.

"History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain once said, "but it does rhyme." And the turmoil over immigration in America today does seem to resonate deeply with the contentious immigration history of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. So, what's the next verse?