How do you say cheesesteak with in Spanish?
Joseph Vento, the owner of Geno's Steaks, doesn't know. And he doesn't care.
Just read the laminated signs, festooned with American eagles, at his South Philadelphia cheesesteak emporium: This is America. When Ordering, Speak English.
Vento's political statement - from a man whose Italian-born grandparents spoke only broken English - captures the anger and discontent felt by many Americans about illegal immigrants.
With a battle looming between the House and Senate on legalizing some immigration violators, the public backlash is framed by two complaints:
One, my grandparents came legally. How come these guys can't? And, two, my grandparents had to learn English. How come these guys don't?
"Go back to the 19th century, and play by those rules," said Vento, 66, whose grandfather became a U.S. citizen in 1921.
But history challenges many assumptions about the hurdles aspiring Americans used to face, say scholars of the last massive migration to the United States, which occurred between 1880 and 1920.
"There was no such thing as an 'illegal' immigrant," said Roger Daniels, a member of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island History Committee and author of Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigrants and Immigration Policy Since 1882.
The Old Country often required exit visas, which created the possibility of illegal emigrants. But the United States did not issue entry visas until 1921.
Before that, no meaningful immigration restrictions existed, except for a bar on Chinese enacted in 1882. Congress imposed no other limits on the number of immigrants - from any one country, or in total. About a million arrived each year in the early 1900s. It wasn't until 1924 that Congress imposed an annual cap of 155,000 immigrants.
"If you could get here and weren't terribly diseased, you could get in," Daniels said.
By contrast, backlogs, country quotas and annual caps now make legal immigration a tortuous and nearly impossible process for many, said Thomas Conaghan, director of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in Upper Darby.
Past immigrants, once here, faced a backlash fueled by anxiety about religions, languages and races that were relatively new to the United States. Fear of anarchist and "Red" ideologies and the competition for jobs also played roles.
Help-wanted ads limited applicants to native-born Americans, said Kathryn Wilson, director of education at the Pennsylvania Historical Society.
