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According to Cas Mudde, a University of Georgia professor, nativism is a largely American notion that is rarely debated in Western Europe or Canada; the word originated with mid-19th-century political parties in the United States, most notably the Know Nothing party, which saw Catholic immigration from nations such as Germany and Ireland as a serious threat to native-born Protestant Americans. [4]
Is opposition to an internal minority on the basis of its supposed “un-American” foundation. Historian Tyler Anbinder defines a nativist as: [2]. someone who fears and resents immigrants and their impact on the United States, and wants to take some action against them, be it through violence, immigration restriction, or placing limits on the rights of newcomers already in the United States.
The Massachusetts Know Nothings did advance attacks on the civil rights of Irish Catholic immigrants. After this, state courts lost the power to process applications for citizenship and public schools had to require compulsory daily reading of the Protestant Bible (which the nativists were sure would transform the Catholic children).
Nativists feared the new arrivals lacked the political, social, and occupational skills needed to successfully assimilate into American culture. This raised the issue of whether the U.S. was still a " melting pot ", or if it had just become a "dumping ground", and many old-stock Americans worried about negative effects on the economy, politics ...
However, anti-immigrant sentiment resurged in the late 1800s as the United States faced an era of economic turmoil. [10] The strength of socialist and anarchist groups grew in the 1870s and 1880s, causing nativists to fear radicalism among the lower classes.
The term Know-Nothing Riot has been used to refer to a number of political uprisings of the Know Nothing Party in the United States of the mid-19th century. These anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic protests culminated into riots in Philadelphia in 1844; St. Louis in 1854, Cincinnati and Louisville in 1855; Baltimore in 1856; Washington, D.C., and New York City in 1857; and New Orleans in 1858.
The nativists supported J. D. Taylor, the mayoral candidate for the anti-immigrant American Party, also known as the Know-Nothing Party. During the riots, German-Americans erected barricades in the streets leading into their Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, and fired a cannon over the heads of a mob of nativists attacking them.
Nativist movements in the United States in the 1840s opposed Irish immigration mainly on religious grounds, as Nativists were overwhelmingly Protestant. Anti-Catholic movements, notably the Ku-Klux-Klan , opposed Catholics out of fear of papal political control in the United States.