Groups such as the Immigration Restriction League, founded by a trio of Harvard alums, emerged to beat back the flood of foreigners, contending they imported disease, crime, and moral decay to American soil; stole jobs from American citizens; and became a burden on public resources. Careful not to portray themselves as anti-immigrant, the group’s members contended they merely wanted to prevent “undesirable” émigrés from taking root in the United States. Many of these undesirables, in the view of the Immigration Restriction League’s founders, which included a climatologist who dabbled in
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