Population Paul Reveres: How a Nativist Vanguard Ignited Modern Anti-Immigrant Hysteria

This talk explores the emergence of the modern anti-immigration movement by tracing the activities and evolving tactics of a network of individuals and organizations who have worked for most of the past 80 years to combat liberalizing tendencies in U.S. immigration policy, and ultimately to overturn the idea that the U.S. is "a nation of immigrants." The cast includes eugenically minded ecologists and well-placed businessmen who spread alarms about an impending "population explosion" a decade before the publication of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller 'The Population Bomb'. It also includes environmental groups, anti-tax activists, an heiress with a passion for birds, and a Michigan ophthalmologist who founded many of the groups spearheading the push for immigration restrictions today. By embracing an ever-evolving array of media, legal, and other tactics--and by trying to appeal to Americans across both liberal-conservative and rural-urban divides--these groups helped to reshape the national dialogue about immigration and normalize ideas that were once considered fringe.


Wendy Wall is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University (SUNY) whose research and teaching focuses on the political culture of the 20th-century U.S. In addition to her prize-winning book, 'Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement', she has published essays on topics including the mid-20th-century interfaith movement and the role of religious language and organizations in postwar debates over immigration reform. Her current book project traces the history of the anti-immigration movement since World War II. She is also leading a public history project aimed at documenting and explaining the widespread use of racially restrictive covenants in Broome County property deeds between 1900 and the 1960s, and exploring their long-term implications.

This event is sponsored by the Bernard Lasky Lecture Series Endowment, the Department of Judaic Studies, and the College of Jewish Studies.

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