Hostility to ‘Outsiders’ Rooted in U.S. Past : Immigration: Historian says distrust of newcomers seems to be part of the national character. But once-shunned groups are eventually embraced into the mainstream.

SAN FRANCISCO — California’s bitter divisions over illegal immigration echo patterns experienced by Americans throughout the nation’s history and will ease once the economy brightens and the newcomers’ social contributions become more evident, according to a noted historian.

John Blum, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University, said immigrants “have always been greeted by a kind of nativism--especially during times of economic difficulty like California has recently faced.”

But eventually, Blum said, the new arrivals acculturate, move out of poverty-infested “pockets of apartheid” and enrich the economy and social vitality of their adopted land.

“At the moment, local governments are aware only of the burdens brought by strangers,” he said. “But in the long run, if we’re patient and encourage assimilation, immigration will prove to be a benefit to California.”

Blum and fellow Yale historian Gaddis Smith presented their views at a weekend seminar for Yale alumni. The conference explored a broad range of topics--from national security threats in the Pacific to government’s role in economic growth--from a historical perspective.

Blum’s lecture on America’s deep-rooted xenophobia was particularly timely for California, where debate over undocumented immigrants and their use of public services has reached an election-year fever pitch.

In April, Gov. Pete Wilson sued the federal government to recover costs associated with illegal immigrants, claiming that they are sapping the state budget, taking jobs from legal residents and swamping hospital emergency rooms. In November, California voters may face a ballot initiative--dubbed “save our state” by its sponsors--that would expel undocumented youths from public schools and drastically cut health services for illegal immigrants.

In his lecture and in remarks afterward, Blum traced the evolution of America’s wariness of foreigners, noting that it “began with the colonists, who held the view that somehow the good people had come here and the bad people had stayed home in Europe.”

Gradually, he said, that feeling evolved into a “persistent, non-rational attitude” on behalf of Americans that “they are somehow a special people and no one is quite fit to join them.”

In the 1850s, it was the Germans and Irish who encountered American ethnocentrism. Fleeing economic destitution, these immigrants raised fears that the “good old stock of America would be vulgarized by interrelationships” with a lower class of people.

The Chinese, who came to California during the Gold Rush, encountered a similarly chilly reception. And in the 1880s and 1890s, the first wave of eastern and southern European immigrants arrived and found themselves “twice stigmatized”--by their darker skin and their religion, Catholicism, which was viewed dimly by a largely Protestant land.

Laws reflecting the nation’s xenophobia came as early as 1798, when Congress passed the Act Concerning Aliens, giving the President unprecedented powers to deport all immigrants he deemed dangerous to national security. Later, there was the 1924 National Origins Act, which greatly restricted immigration according to a system designed to prevent major change in the country’s racial and ethnic makeup.

Despite the hostile climate and other obstacles, Blum said, each immigrant group has, over several generations, moved from “segregation to acculturation.” Typically, he said, newcomers have built their own professional institutions--law firms, for instance--and, after demonstrating their abilities to the doubting society at large, have been embraced into the mainstream.

Declaring himself “optimistic about California,” Blum said these “successful patterns of the past will replicate themselves in the future. We merely have to find the commonalities. It sounds banal, but we’re all Americans after all.”