From the very beginning of the Republic, American politicians have made emotional political capital out of the fear of foreign devils. First, in the 1700s, it was those irresponsible Germans who would threaten our "essentially English" culture (presumably from their excessive punctuality and thrift). After the Germans had become our second-largest ethnicity, worry turned to the aforementioned lazy, drunken Irish. The Irish in turn having become so popular that more people claim to be Irish than really are, other groups replaced them as the menace o’ the day. The stupid Swedes, the mindless Poles, the un-Christian Jews, the too-Catholic Italians, even the obscure Croatians (who sent us such shiftless drifters as Tesla); all this teeming refuse and more deluged our shores. In 1910, 14.7 percent of US residents were foreign born, much higher than today’s 10 percent or so.

All this occurred without much real interference from politicians. Only the Orientals suffered from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, passed because of the well-known racial inferiority of the Chinese. It was obvious to the Americans of 1882 that no nation composed of Chinamen would ever be able to excel in the sciences…

In the 1920s, more brilliant Aryan master-race schemes were passed. One group restricted were the Japanese, thus ensuring that hundreds of thousands of smart, hard-working people were forced to stay in Hirohito’s Japan and work for Mitsubishi et. al.

Fortunately, not all the European Jews were kept from escaping to America before WWII. Though many thousands kept out by immigration restrictions went to unnecessary deaths in the Holocaust, at least most of the nuclear physicists managed to escape involuntary employment under Hitler. Jingoists should think really hard about an alternate WWII where Germany had not only the best jet aircraft, the most advanced cruise and ballistic missiles, but nuclear bombs as well.

When the best and brightest people can flee to the most peaceful and freest nations, the whole world is safer. [emphasis mine]

Libertarians should have learned by now to be a little suspicious when politicians offer to solve our problems with the use of minefields and secret police. Especially when it’s the same politicians who created the problems in the first place.

We laugh at the stupidity of our ancestors, who sincerely believed that Irish were all lazy drunks, Jews had low IQs, Chinese could not be doctors, etc. We now know that Irish are very productive drunks, Jews have inherently high IQs (the fact that their mothers make them study hard can’t have anything to do with it, of course), and only Chinese or Indians can be doctors or scientists (math courses are too much work for white students). However, as with any other area of life, these things are more accurately discovered by market processes rather than by a large secret police bureaucracy. . . .