ABSTRACT
Immigration, a national and local issue of significant interest, offers an excellent window into this changing world. To a modern audience accustomed to a closely policed border and stringent immigration caps, the wide-open nature of immigration to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century is difficult to comprehend. Immigration and immigrants were major components of news coverage, from the nativism of the 1840s and 1850s through progressivism in the later nineteenth century. Immigrants may have been represented as fallible, but immigration in general was good, whether from Europe or Asia. Newspapers both echoed and led the national turn from treating immigration as a positive good to a dubious and even threatening force that needed stringent controls in the late nineteenth century. Coverage of immigration reveals a significant increase in the complexity of coverage and concern for the citizenship implications of the massive, unchecked influx of foreigners to America.
