“Why do we continue to import people who hate us?” Roy asked in an interview with the far-right Breitbart News. “[T]his legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas.”
Roy and his allies strike a sadly familiar note.
The American, or Know-Nothing Party, blew in like a tornado riding a storm of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant hatred that swept the country, including Texas, in the 1840s and 1850s. A dozen members of the party won election to the Texas State House in 1855. Sam Houston, the former president of the Texas Republic who represented the state in the U.S. Senate and would shortly thereafter win the governor’s mansion, endorsed the party’s platform.
The party’s hyperbolic fear of the Catholic church can be found in an 1855 edition of the Texas State Times, a pro-Know Nothing publication. The newspaper invited its readers to imagine a nightmare world in which “our Senate and cabinet [is] composed of a majority of Catholics . . . The inquisition, the crucifix [and] . . . torture . . . would be reared in the forum of Justice . . . our rivers blush with the blood of protestants.”
Famously, the Ku Klux Klan ran Dallas in the early 1920s. In 1922 Hiram Welsey Evans, a Dallas dentist, took over the national organization. On October 24, 1923, more than 150,000 attended a special Ku Klux Klan Day at the State Fair of Texas. On that occasion, Evans made a speech in which he charged that Catholic immigrants plotted to take over the country and make the Pope the king of America.
“Catholicism is built,” Evans insisted in one of his pamphlets, “. . . upon the . . . idea of the individual as subject instead of citizen.”
Under Evans, the Klan, along with labor unions and the eugenics movement (which advocated selective breeding to create a so-called “master race”), persuaded the Congress to pass the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictive immigration law in American history.
The law imposed quotas on Eastern and Southern European countries with large Catholic and Jewish populations. Immigration from those parts of Europe dropped to almost zero. The world’s most famous Holocaust victim, Anne Frank, and her family, could not enter the United States because of the Johnson-Reed Act, which wasn’t repealed until 1965.