Introduction

The magazines and the illustrators are long gone and largely forgotten, but the images endure. Like the 1903 print from Judge, a popular political magazine of the period. It's titled, "The Immigrant: Is he an Acquisition or a Detriment?" and depicts a hulking, exhausted new arrival to America's shores. He wears ragged clothing and lumbers inland with his wife, all their possessions in tow. As human cargo ships sail to and fro in the distance, a small mob greets the man, each individual representing a voice in the raucous turn-of-the-century debate. A contractor says, "He gives me cheap labor." A workman says, "He cheapens my labor." A health officer says, "He brings disease." A citizen calls him "a menace." A politician says, "He makes votes for me." Silently determined, the man stares straight ahead, ignoring them all.

Sound familiar?

The targets have changed in the past century, but the concerns have not. Today, we're still being told that when immigrants aren't busy depressing wages; displacing workers; and overrunning our schools, hospitals, and jails, they're compromising our national security. But attacks that were once directed at Asians and Europeans—along with Catholics and Jews—are now directed primarily at Mexicans and other Latin Americans who in recent decades have comprised the bulk of newcomers. Steve King, a congressman from Iowa, compares Mexican aliens to livestock. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congressman who sports T-shirts announcing that AMERICA IS FULL, says Hispanic immigrants have turned Miami into "a Third World country." And Don Goldwater, nephew of conservative icon Barry Goldwater and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Arizona, has called for interring illegal immigrants in concentration camps and pressed them into forced labor building a wall across the southern U.S. border.

Playing on post 9/11 fears, political candidates in California have distributed flyers depicting Mexican immigrants as turbaned Islamic terrorists. Volunteer border patrol groups like the Minuteman Project insist that migrants sneaking across the Sonoran desert aren't just coming here to work and feed their families but also to "reconquer" the Southwest. And despite the fact that, relative to natives, the undocumented are more likely to have jobs and less likely to engage in crime, Newt Gingrich maintains that "young Americans in our cities are [being] massacred" by illegal aliens and says the "war here at home" against these immigrants is "even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Cable news personalities like Lou Dobbs tell us that Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and other Latino migrants bear infectious diseases that imperil U.S. citizens and leave our health-care system teetering on bankruptcy. Talk radio hosts like Michael Savage have urged Americans to protest the presence of Latinos by burning the Mexican flag. J.D. Hayworth, a former Arizona congressman who became a talk radio host after losing his seat in 2006, says we should give America's estimated 12 million undocumented residents—half of whom have been here for more than five years and many of whom have married American citizens and borne American children—120 days to leave the country voluntarily and then deport the remainders by force. Mike Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful and former governor of Arkansas, adopted Haworth's idea as part of his official campaign platform. Huckabee's reward was an endorsement from Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project.