The Melting Pot

Okay—everyone who knows what that means, raise your hand.

But were we ever really a melting pot?

Or were we only a melting pot for White Anglo-Saxons?

It certainly wasn’t true for Black people, who were dragged here in chains. We weren’t a melting pot for Mexicans. And we weren’t a melting pot for the Asians who came here to build our railroads.

As the country entered the era of the Robber Barons, we started to pass anti-immigration laws. The first major one was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. We wanted to ban people who “didn’t look like us.” At the same time, railroad barons still wanted cheap labor—so they imported workers from Asia.

In an article from Reason, they describe what happened:

On February 28, 1882, Sen. John F. Miller of California introduced a bill to exclude Chinese immigrant laborers from the country. For two hours, the former Union general presented his case. The Chinese, Miller said, posed an imminent danger, in part because they came from a "degraded and inferior race."

Other senators joined in, calling them "rats," "beasts," and "swine." They claimed that Oriental civilization was incompatible with American life and would corrupt the nation.

Chinese immigrants also posed an economic threat to white workers, Miller argued, because of their "machine-like" efficiency and "muscles of iron." He claimed that American laborers—on farms, in factories, and workshops—couldn’t compete with such low-paid workers. A vote for exclusion, he said, was a vote for American labor and the public good.

Later came the Geary Act of 1892, which extended the exclusion and required Chinese residents to carry identification papers. Then, another wave of immigration laws swept through in the 1920s.

This wasn’t 2025—it was 1882.

The Immigration Act of 1917 expanded the exclusions to cover more Asians. And for the first time, the idea of a visa was introduced—formalized in the 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act), which created quotas to limit immigrants considered “undesirable.”

These laws were passed for one reason: a combination of racial prejudice, economic anxiety, xenophobia, and nationalism. In other words, they were designed to limit non-English-speaking, non-White immigrants.

And now, here we are again.

Trump. Anti-DEI. Anti-immigrant policies.

Ask yourself: Why is he only going after Latinos?

Why did he invite white South Africans to immigrate—but not Black Africans or non-Whites from other regions?