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In 1958, in response to an alarming uptick in xenophobic chatter, the Anti-Defamation League asked then-Senator John F. Kennedy to write about Americas melting-pot strengths and the need for immigration reform. The resulting essay, A Nation of Immigrantspublished as a book after JFKs deathpopularized the idealistic phrase thats been touted by politicians ever since.

America still likes to think of itself as a nation of immigrants, but even JFK admitted in print: the truth has always been more complicated. All four of his grandparents were American-born children of Irish immigrants who confronted the hostility of an already established group of Americans, wrote Kennedy. It is not unusual for people to fear and distrust that which they are not familiar with. Every new group coming to America found this fear and suspicion facing them.

The history of immigration in America is in fact the history of its nativist foes. (Not to mention the history of colonialism, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the enslavement of Africans.) Were reluctantly and uncomfortably an inclusive nation; were a nation of immigrants despite a deep, dark history of efforts to keep newcomers outor at least down.

Take the immigrant Kennedys. JFKs paternal great-grandparents, Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, were the first to leave their respective County Wexford families, sailing in a crowded coffin ship seeking safer shores across the Atlantic. Landing in 1848 at the docks of East Boston, not far from Terminal A at todays Logan Airport (named for the son of an Irish immigrant brewer), they met, married and started a family, but quickly discovered they were unwanted refugees.

Theyd been oppressed in Ireland by their homelands colonizerEngland had banned their religion and their native language; prevented them from voting and holding office; reacted slowly and indifferently when the Potato Famine of the 1840s led to mass starvation (a million dead) and mass migration (upwards of two million fled).

But in America? It turned out that the land George Washington had envisioned as a safe and agreeable asylum for the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions didnt really want them, either.

As part of the first large wave of (mostly poor and rural) Irish newcomers to (mostly urban) America25,000 arrived in Boston in 1848 alone, among the million who came to North Americathe Kennedys experienced many of the 19th-century low points in the nations tolerance for the outsider: voter suppression, anti-immigrant legislation and voting efforts, riots at the polls, plus the mid-1850s rise of the nativist Know Nothing party, its hatred aimed mostly at Irish and Catholics.

In their immigrant-crowded East Boston neighborhood, Bridget and Patrick Kennedy and their children and neighbors witnessed violent protests outside their homes, their church, their businesses. They looked out the window at parades of young men marching with faux-patriotic groups like the Order of Free and Accepted Americans, the Order of the American Star, the American Protestant Society, and the Wide Awakes, threatening the Irish with their angry chants, Wide awake! Wide awake! Backed by their right-wing newspapers and magazinesthe Republican, the Protestant, the Spirit of 76their mantra: Americans must rule America.

Boston had been a hub of anti-slavery activism, but otherwise it was hardly a model of integration or tolerance. Take Boston artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who helped create the telegraph and Morse code. Though he later said his invention aspired to make one neighborhood of the whole country, Morses electromagnetic dots and dashes were originally designed as a secret code that could be used to defeat a rumored plot to make Popery (Catholicism) the law of the land.

A well-known anti-immigrant, pro-slavery activist, Morses 1835 book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, called for limits on immigration from Catholic countries and for banning Catholics from holding public office. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York as candidate for the Native American Party (later known as the American Party, and generally known through the mid-1800s as the Know Nothingsits members claimed to know nothing about it. John Wilkes Booth was an adherent, as was Ulysses Grants vice president, Henry Wilson.)

Morse and the Know Nothings were among many voices roaring against nineteenth-century immigrants, their words and actions eerily familiar to those of recent years. Xenophobia had become an American tradition, as Erika Lee put it in her 2019 book, America for Americans.

Clearly, not much has changed over the centuries. Weve always tried to prevent immigrants (and minorities) from access to the ballot (and to citizenship, and to power).

Today, the street corners of the Kennedys East Boston neighborhood are anchored by bodegas and Latin markets. Those startup businesses, many run by immigrants from Brazil and Mexico, replaced the Italian delis that in turn had replaced the Irish grocery shops like the one JFKs great-grandmother Bridget ran for twenty years after the Civil Warand the Irish saloons like those that helped launch the late-1800s political career of Bridgets son, P.J..

John F. Kennedy votes in the 1946 Massachusetts democratic primary election in which he ran for congressman. With him are maternal grandparents Mr. and Mrs. John F. Fitzgerald (Honey Fitz). (Photo by CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

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A microcosm of newcomer entrepreneurism, East Boston continued to reflect an increasingly immigrant rich nation. Recent census data shows that while 2021 had the slowest population growth in U.S. history, growth attributed to immigration contributed to an uptick in the percentage of Americans born elsewhere. Immigrants now represent 14.1 percent of the U.S. population, inching closer to the all-time high of 14.8 percent, which was reached in 1890.

Then as now, immigrants came despite the efforts of men like Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime Massachusetts statesman who through the 1890s called on voters to guard our civilization against an infusion which seems to threaten deterioration. Lodge railed against hyphenism, preferring 100 percent Americanism to Irish-American or Italian-American designations.

When Lodge ran for the U.S. Senate in 1892, his support for strict immigration limits and a proposed federal literacy test for newcomers helped him defeat Irish Congressman Patrick Collins, whom Lodge decried as hard-drinking, idle, quarrelsome, and disorderly. Many of Lodges nativist ideas, including the literacy test, were later incorporated into the Immigration Act of 1917.

On the Fourth of July, 1895, the American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic group, paraded through East Boston ranting about Irish aliens and enemies of the state. Riots ensued and shots were fired and an immigrant longshoreman was killed, dying on the steps of P.J. Kennedys saloon. P.J. invited his friend, the newly elected Congressman John F. Fitzgerald, to come to East Boston and calm things down. At a fundraiser for the murdered longshoreman, Fitzgerald addressed the intense hatred of everything Irish and Roman Catholic that persisted, and blamed radical, secretive mens groups for trying to monopolize all the Americanism in this country.

We are one people and owe the same duty to our country, Fitzgerald told the crowd. Why, then, this desire to set one class of people against another?

Decades later, the grandson of P.J. Kennedy and Honey Fitz Fitzgerald defeated the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, and midway through his Senate term JFK penned his hopeful views on the subject of Americanism: There is no part of America that has not been touched by our immigrant background, he wrote. Kennedy also lobbied in A Nation of Immigrants against a quota system that favored the Northern and Western European countries of his ancestors, and discriminated against immigrants from Asia and Africa. (That national origins quota system was ended by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.)

The 35th president clearly had very different views than those of the 45th president, the son, grandson, and spouse of immigrants, who infamously declared his preference for more immigrants from places like Norway and fewer from shithole countries. (And whose influence led to the removal of the words nation of immigrants from the mission statement of the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services.)

Champions of immigration have always faced the build-a-wall fervor of former President Trumps base. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz put it her 2021 book, Not A Nation of Immigrants, the ideology of JFKs nation of immigrants premise is flawedand under constant assault.

The fear-mongering of the Morses, Lodges, and Trumps of America will continue to try to shout down the hopeful words of its Kennedys and Obamas. In no other country is my story even possible, the nations first Black president once said, echoing the optimism of George Washington, who wrote: I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. Then again, Americas first president was a slaveholder whose ideals on asylum clearly didnt apply to enslaved Africans. Its complicated.

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What the Kennedy's Immigration Story Tells Us About America - TIME