Pointing Out the Irony of Nativist Policies

JOSEPH KEPPLER, Looking Backward (1893)

By the 1890s, America had become a nation of immigrants, and for the next two decades the wave of European immigrants washing ashore drove its industrial development and changed its demographic mix. Many industrialists welcomed the cheap labor immigrants brought, while urban political machines manipulated newcomers for partisan gains. Increasing immigration, however, raised alarms from native-born whites who caricatured many immigrants as radicals and culturally inferior, just the sort who might destroy American customs and institutions. In this cartoon, published in Puck, an American magazine of political satire, artist and editor Joseph Keppler comments on America’s immigration policies.

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