On immigration, we need Lincoln

CHICAGO -- The immigration issue has the Democrats running scared. Sen. Hillary Clinton's debate flip-flop on the issuing of New York driver's licenses to the undocumented offered a prime example of the party's general discomfort with the subject. The fact is, none of the candidates of a generally pro-immigrant party know how to handle the current anti-immigrant tide.

The same economic woes that tilt in the Democrats' favor on most domestic issues exacerbate fears of job loss and a wage squeeze tied to cheaper immigrant -- especially illegal immigrant -- labor. In the wake of the legislative failure on comprehensive immigration reform, the status of the 10 to 12 million estimated undocumented aliens in the country remains a subject ripe for the political plucking.

It is no wonder that Republican candidates have seized the initiative here: "Mexican illegals" serve as a handy scapegoat for the economic strains and general sense of social unfairness affecting working-class and lower middle-class families. Obscuring the distorting effects of a war budget, displacement from globalization and the long-term underfunding of public services, playing the "illegal immigration card" (along with the "terrorism card") just might keep the GOP in the White House.

Yet history offers another lesson here, if only Democrats were smart enough to steal a page from their opponents' playbook.

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THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT IS AN OLD ONE in American politics and never fiercer than in the early 1850s. When the immigrant rate reached its all-time peak in 1854 -- four times its relative size today (including estimated illegal arrivals) and overwhelmingly "alien" in religion (Catholic) or language (German) from the native-stock population -- it provoked a massive nativist counter-response.

The American Party, better known as the Know-Nothings, quickly established themselves as the likely replacement to the fading Whigs as the leading national alternative to pro-slavery Democrats. Favoring severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries, and a 21-year residence requirement for naturalization, the Know Nothings showed early strength across the country. By 1855, a Know Nothing had been elected mayor of Chicago on a promise to bar all immigrants from city jobs, and several New England states required the reading of the Protestant Bible and barred the teaching of foreign languages in public schools.

More ominous than even these electoral outcomes was the surrounding climate of intimidation. Amid widely scattered anti-immigrant assaults, 20 German immigrants were lynched in Louisville, Ky., on Aug. 5, 1855.

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POLITICALLY, IT WAS THE EMERGENT REPUBLICAN PARTY that ultimately had the most to lose from the rise of the Know Nothings. The two parties contended for many of the same voters and encompassed many state and local officeholders who criss-crossed in their affiliations. Their fate depended on a fundamental question: would nativism or anti-slavery be the more compelling message in the farms and cities outside the slave South?

As it happened, by the end of 1856, the Republicans delivered a death-blow to Know Nothingism, a movement which itself had split along sectional lines. Several factors, undoubtedly, were at work, including a fortuitous, if temporary, drop in immigration rates and a recovery from economic recession. But the turning point was also ideological. Republicans convinced voters that the real threat to their status and standard of living was not immigrant competitors but rather the exploitative labor system of slavery.