Boston Athenæum

September 26, 2017 at the Boston Athenæum. President Trump’s immigration rhetoric has elicited outrage in Massachusetts, and especially in the vicinity of Harvard Yard (where Trump won just 4% of the vote). So, in Greater Boston, it may turn more than a few faces crimson to learn that—like basketball, the microwave oven, and public education—the intellectual playbook for anti-immigration policy was drafted right here in Massachusetts, by a small group of Harvard-educated Brahmin intellectuals led by Prescott Farnsworth Hall. Their work, which began in 1894, culminated exactly 100 years ago with the passage of the federal Immigration Act of 1917, opening a new epoch of national immigration policy. In this lecture, author Neil Swidey will discuss the roots of Trump’s anti-immigration fervor and the surprisingly influential local characters behind it. He explored these connections, and their implications, in his Globe Magazine cover story earlier this year.