Congress established U.S. immigration policy on a racial basis with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that “any alien being a free white person” could immigrate and gain citizenship. Over the next eighty years, the so-called old immigrants from northern and western Europe dominated the U.S. immigrant population.  Beginning in the 1880s, the new immigrants began arriving from southern and eastern Europe.  Their advent prompted the first serious movement to restrict European immigration. Pressure groups and regional populations such as the Farmer’s National Congress, the Farmers’ Educational and Co-operative Union, the Georgia Federation of Labor, and southern industrial and agricultural employers and laborers appealed for the restriction of the new immigrants as extensions of the surge of nativism in certain regions of the country. We usually associate immigration during the late 18th and early 19th centuries with locations such as Ellis Island in New York, tenements in Chicago, and the Central Pacific Railroad in the West rather than the South because the latter region received far fewer immigrants than the North and West. Rowland T. Berthoff and John Higham explore the U.S. South’s response to southern and eastern European immigrants in ""Southern Attitudes toward Immigration, 1865-1914"" and Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, respectively. While Higham claims that some white southerners’ hostility to new immigrants is exceptional, most white southerners did not want the new immigrants. Public opinion from primary documents such as U.S. congressional documents, newspapers, and magazines from 1865 to 1914, not only documents and reflects the hostility towards southern and eastern European populations but it also exudes the region’s strong sentiments of nativism.