Undo the 14th Amendment!

Build a wall!

Deport families!

Track immigrants like FedEx packages!

Today’s Know Nothings make these suggestions as solutions to the issues raised by immigration in 21st century America. Donald Trump and other GOP presidential aspirants are not without precedent. For attempted political advantage, they seize on the nation’s xenophobia, forgetting that immigration has historically strengthened the nation and advanced its development. America has been built on the strong backs of immigrants who came in the industrial age, on the hunched knees of migrant farm workers, on women who continue to risk their health and lives in sweat shops, and on the innovative brains of highly skilled techies who arrive in the information age. We are a nation of immigrants, and all the better for it.

Most of today’s complainers forget that their ancestors suffered the same prejudices endured by those now made to feel unwelcome.

In the middle of the 19th century, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party or the Know Nothings built its foundation on nativism. Members of secret societies opposed to immigrants, such as the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which helped give rise to the American party, when asked whether they belonged to such a group, supposedly responded, “I know nothing”— hence, the name.

The party responded to the large number of Irish Catholic immigrants who were arriving in the U.S. to escape their native land’s potato famine during the late 1840s by advocating that one should have to live in the U.S. for 25 years before being accorded citizenship.

Effectively, this would delay their voting, a goal of the nativists. While having some success in local elections, their 25 year citizenship requirement never was achieved nationally and the Irish emerged as an impressive political force. By the eve of the Civil War, the Know Nothing Party, fractured by the slavery issue, imploded.

Certainly, nativism did not disappear in the United States as today’s war on Latinos, especially Mexicans, demonstrates. However, the fate of the Know Nothings may serve as a warning to our contemporary GOP. The Republican Party’s great leader, and first successful candidate for President, Abraham Lincoln, renounced the Know Nothings. He recognized how they undermined America’s aspirations. How would he feel about the turn his party currently has taken, or at least many members of his party recently have pursued? The 14th Amendment, which begins “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” was ratified on July 9, 1868, three years after his martyrdom. To undo the Constitution by diluting the rights of those born in the U.S., as suggested by these new Know Nothings, would destroy the fabric of our society and the promise of Lincoln’s once great Republican Party.

Bruce M. Stave is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut and co-author of "From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America."