America's History of Not Welcoming Immigrants

Flashback 1995 . The New Republic reports:

For nearly a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, the states passed a dizzying series of laws excluding aliens from an array of occupations--from optometrist, dentist and doctor to teacher, police officer and pool-hall operator. The anti-alien laws are a grim record of the country's anxieties throughout the century; but the Supreme Court, without blinking, let most of them stand. In 1915, for example, Benjamin Cardozo, then an appellate judge, upheld a New York law that forbade legal aliens from being employed to build the New York City subways. "To disqualify aliens is discrimination, indeed," wrote Cardozo, "but not arbitrary discrimination, for the principle of exclusion is the restriction of the resources of the state to the advancement and profit of the state. Ungenerous and unwise such discrimination may be, it is not for that reason unlawful."

An article well worth your time.