Not only does immigrant reform represent one of the most complex and divisive political issues in America history, it also illustrates one of the greatest paradoxes of American democracy and the foundation of the United States. Even though America was founded on the values of freedom and built by immigrants, the country has a contentious history of antagonizing its existing immigration population and discouraging potential migrants. This historic trend of anti-immigration attitude and legislation stems from the unfamiliarity and uncertainty associated with migrants, which creates vulnerability and represents a threat to the stability of the nation’s national security, both internal and external. Not only is the influx of immigrants viewed as …show more content…
The systemic threat of immigration to both internal and external forms of national security not only has a lasting agency in American history, but also fuels significant policy implications and human rights consequences in the modern Trump era. From the Naturalization Act of 1790 to Trump’s border wall, the United States and its expansion of restrictive immigration regulations is closely linked to perceived external and internal national security threats and implications, which ultimately fosters a dangerous compromise of civil liberties and human rights in hopes of generating a sense of law and order with the assistance of bureaucratic …show more content…
This negative portrayal of immigrants proliferated through spread of flash photography of the late 1880s and influenced restrictive legislation to not only encompass threats from lack of social characteristics but also on the basis of health and safety. For example, Jacob Riis’s photographs depicted dirty and claustrophobic living conditions in the immigrant slums, where people and their belongings are stacked from the floor to the ceiling. These foul conditions captured by Riis were very similar to Graham’s description of tenement houses where “1231 Italians lived in 120 rooms…chickens and goats fed and slaughtered in the halls” (Graham 17). Close quarters contributed to the rampant spread of diseases like cholera, which was colloquially known as “the disease of the poor…and carried by immigrants” (Graham 18). Similar to the Irish’s Trinity House, the “highest mortality rates” of cholera were in immigrant tenements in New York City (Ignatiev 137). This negative association between immigrants and disease resulted in support for racial engineering and scientific racism, in which the government engaged in systematically exclusion based on racial preferences. Citing Jacob Riis and the “description of revolting…garbage dumps the miserable beings who try to burrow in those depths of