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Dear Latter-day Saints, your ancestors were among the immigrant poor who the Republican Party tried to prevent from migrating to the U.S. in the 19th Century. In 1879 U.S. Secretary of State William M. Evarts attempted to cut off LDS immigration from Europe. His rationale? /1 
He contended that the Latter-day Saint immigrants were "drawn mainly from the ignorant classes, who are easily influenced by the double appeal to their passions and their poverty." /2
It was a common theme in the 19th century: One Protestant minister warned in 1853 that a group of Mormons was then "swarming" to Utah "from the dark lanes, and crowded factories, and filthy collieries of the old world,--the sewerage and drainings of European population." /3
In 1856 the @nytimes reported on one LDS immigrant ship which just arrived at Castle Garden: "Our reporter saw these people, conversed with them, and estimated them, intellectually and otherwise. They all belong to the lower, almost to the lowest classes of society." /4
The @nytimes continued: "Their countenances were imbruted with ignorance and dirt--not the material dirt of a sea voyage, but the moral dirt of a life of imbecility and indolence." /5
An 1860 government report complained that LDS converts were drawn from the "deluded rank and file" of European society: "English, Welsh, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian poor, chiefly, of that class of ignorant religionists who are looking in every age for starling revelations." /6
In 1883, the US consul at Basel, Switzerland warned of a LDS immigrant ship headed to the U.S. with "pauper polygamists" on board. It called the Mormons "poor, ignorant, and in many cases imbecile people." /7
Even though that particular group was allowed entrance, the @sltrib nonetheless objected, deeming the newcomers "just about as bad material as any that drifts to our shores." /8
As the @sltrib put it, even though they might not become public burdens as paupers "they are as great a burden to this country--morally--as any pauper Irishmen who have ever reached America." /9
Thus, Latter-day Saints were sometimes viewed as "aliens," "degraded," intellectually inferior, lazy, susceptible to superstition and fanaticism, and from the lowest stratum of European or American society. As such they threatened the progress of Western civilization. /10
In 2019 we are again making a class-based argument for who fits our definition of what it means to be an American. If you fit that definition today, would your immigrant ancestors? Were they a burden or a blessing to the U.S.? Who got to decide? /end
