The current outpouring of concern over immigration to the United States is nothing new. Indeed, the history of North America, from early Viking settlements in Canada to the mostly Latino and Asian immigration of today, often centers on the conflict between newcomers and those who have previously staked their claim to the American dream.

Though it may sound naïve, I believe the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment will soon subside and that the United States will emerge from it changed demographically but unchanged in terms of our aspirations and ideals. A brief review of America’s unique immigration odyssey shows why.

Though immigration has been vital to the development of our national character, Americans have frequently been hostile to new waves of immigrants. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s, to the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” Party of the 1840s, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s, to the National Origin Quotas of the 1920s, to Operation Wetback in the 1950s, to the wall being erected on our southern border today, the pattern has repeated itself. We welcome immigrants when we need cheap labor or when we are threatened militarily, we scapegoat and deport them in times of economic uncertainty.

In 1923, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians were ineligible for naturalization. The Court conceded that Asian Indians are Caucasian, but deemed that they were not white. The intention of the Founding Fathers, the Court wrote, was to “confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons that they knew as ‘white’.” While “it may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor,” the Court wrote, “the average man knows perfectly well there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.”

Again in 1934 the Supreme Court wrote that for the purposes of naturalization the term “white peoples” excluded “the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, and the Filipinos.” Yet, less than a decade later, the 60-year-old Chinese Exclusion Laws were repealed and immigration quotas were established for Indians, Filipinos and other long-excluded nationalities. The event that triggered this enlightened view was the Second World War. Though some groups bitterly opposed repealing the exclusion law, U.S. policy makers saw the inconsistency of asking Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese and others to fight Nazi and Imperial Japanese racial supremacists while discriminating against certain “races” at home.

During the Cold War, immigration laws were further liberalized to allow the United States to better compete economically, technologically, and militarily with the Soviet Union. All racial impediments to immigration and citizenship were abolished. U.S. scientists, both American and foreign-born, worked side by side, developing transistors, micro-chips, genetically-engineered pharmaceuticals, and ever more powerful computers. Foreign-born entrepreneurs founded or co-founded such firms as Yahoo, Google, and many others.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, foreign manual laborers helped fuel the housing and construction boom and contributed to growth in agriculture, meat processing, hospitality and other labor intensive industries. There are many immigrants, some of them illegal aliens, serving in America’s current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is an incident from a previous war, WWII that leads me to believe today’s anti-immigrant movement is just one of many that will eventually subside. In 1945, General Stillwell flew to California to award the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously to a young Nisei soldier, Sergeant Kazuo Masuda, who had single-handedly fired a mortar on Nazi positions and had been killed in Cassino, Italy. A young actor who participated in the ceremony, and who went on to become Governor of California and President of the United States, paid tribute to the fallen soldier in words that express how America ultimately comes to view immigration:

“Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on a way – an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. This is the American way.”

Carl Shusterman served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and is principal of The Law Offices of Carl Shusterman, Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at carl@shusterman.com.