Unfortunatly bigotry never goes away, the focus just changes to some other people. I heard people saying 9/11 was the best thing to happen to blacks because now people will be against arabs/muslims.
I you recall older people had issues with the Irish when they came flooding in, same with germans in earlier periods, and now with mexicans flooding the border. Whoever is willing to work the cheapest and bring down wages is the scapegoat of the period.
A major reason people today are less bigoted is that many more people go to college and get an education so they don't compete for the labor/manufacturing jobs like their parents did with immigrants fresh off the boat. Well some people do complain about Indian H1B visa people but that is not as common.
I would agree with the statement, but I think most Americans have an intangible concept of terrorism to suspect anyone who doesn't look or talk "American" enough (including those with "non-American" accents), with a much stronger focus on those appearing or sounding like 'Arabs/Muslims". In fact the amazing thing to me is that many in the United States think there can't be a home-grown terrorist, even though we have had the example of Timothy McVeigh. Later I'll show how these perceptions impact us.
The highest Irish immigration was during the Potato Famine (or "Great Famine" in Ireland) from 1845 to 1860, sending about 1.5 million to the shores of the United States. This ultimately amounted to more than 5% of the U.S. population being just from Ireland for decades. The main German immigration hit about 1848 to 1860, driven by conflict in their homeland, and was just below a million German immigrants to the United States for that timeframe. By 1870, 15% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, and 20% of the workforce (93% of immigration at that time was from Europe).
I can understand that Mexican Nationals are a majority percentage (about 57%) of illegal immigrants right now, but please don't call or consider that it is all from that country. Legal immigration numbers currently match about the same (around 57% of all legal immigrants to the United States each year) for Mexico too. The U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is the busiest in the world, doing immigrant and spouse/fiance(e) of U.S. citizen petitions for all of Mexico, at a rate of 800 to 1000 per workday (weekdays, excluding Mexican and American holidays).
My wife and stepchildren are Legal Permanent Residents from Mexico. All LPRs are work-authorized in the United States, plus a number of other "non-immigrant" visa categories. But recently at her workplace she was accused of trying to steal the identity of a customer when she wrote down their driver's licence number on their personal check they were trying to cash. And it wasn't as it happened, or even immediately afterwards. The customer waited until they arrived back home to call into the store anonymously.
My wife could have shown her own driver's license to prove she doesn't need another. And the number on its own can't be used to gain further information in stealing someone's identity. But the customer, hearing my wife's accent, felt that my wife is not native to this country, and therefore was up to no good when doing a menial process that is part of the store's procedures.
The stories and misassumptions ("Marry a U.S. citizen and instantly become a U.S. citizen yourself" is the biggest untruth) about immigration are amazing, especially when you consider the origins of most Americans. Anti-immigrant feelings have been high in the past at times, and I hope we aren't in a cycle where they will get any worse. Currently the percentage of foreign-born to the U.S. population and workforce are lower than what they have been in the past.
