“Hyphenated Americans” — Anti-Immigrant Bias and the Enlargement of Whiteness

German and Irish and Italian immigrants to the United States were not always considered good candidates to become White Americans. In the nineteenth century, European immigrants, especially those who were Catholic, were considered an alien threat to mainstream “old stock” White Americans who were mostly Protestant and saw themselves as having “Anglo-Saxon” ancestry. The slow and uneven process which led to the merging of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants into the mainstream of White American status and identity was put into motion by the perceived threat to White domination arising from the emancipation and enfranchisement of large numbers of Black Americans following the Civil War. Enlarging Whiteness by bringing European immigrants and their descendants into the fold of the White American Nation helped maintain the social, economic, and political dominance of Whiteness in the United States. <a href="https://medium.com/@regie.stites/hyphenated-americans-anti-immigrant-bias-and-the-enlargement-of-whiteness-27340c199728">Website</a>