“My opinion, with respect to emigration, is, that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement.”
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
“The admitted right of a government to prevent the influx of elements hostile to its internal peace and security may not be questioned.”
—GROVER CLEVELAND
“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or to leave the country.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“[N]ow there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“If they had only stopped immigration about twenty or thirty years ago, the good Americans could all have had plenty of land and we’d have been an agricultural country forever.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
—DONALD TRUMP