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Originally Posted by New Brisavoine
Also in NYC, there were several riots in the 19th century against the newly arrived migrants (Irish in particular).
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Yes, this is partly why the 14th Amendment specified birthright citizenship. There has been a revisionist history floating around lately that birthright citizenship was written into the U.S. Constitution (14th Amendment) only to guarantee citizenship of former slaves. The 14th was indeed meant to codify citizenship for black people living in the U.S., but its purpose was
also to make it unambiguous who was considered a citizen since citizenship eligibility was not specified in the constitution before the Civil War. Up until that point U.S. citizenship eligibility was only addressed by Congress via the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that only white persons "of good character" could be
naturalized as U.S. citizens. (People who were born free in the U.S. -- both white and black -- were considered citizens if they resided in a state that did not exclude black people from citizenship of the state.)
In the decade or so before the Civil War there was a major wave of anti-immigrant fever directed mostly at Irish and German Catholics that were immigrating to the U.S. in waves. There were various attempts by some political groups to limit accessibility to citizenship for these groups: some attempts were made to have them not be classified as white (thus not eligible to naturalize), to change the waiting period for naturalization, and challenges for whether the children of these immigrants were eligible for citizenship at birth. The 14th Amendment was written with full memory of these political battles as that had happened less than a decade before it was created.
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