I know I shouldn’t expect anything from the New York Times, but their editorial on Monday about the House immigration bill included a common trope that got on my nerves more than usual. The House measure is described as “a bill so draconian it sounds like something out of the Know-Nothing anti-Irish movement of 150 years ago.” At most, this might be dismissed as hyperbole–which would be a mistake, because it’s not hyperbole, it’s flat wrong. The Know-Nothings were not opposed to immigration–their 1856 platform calls for the exclusion only of paupers and criminals. It’s just that once foreigners got here, the Know-Nothings wanted to screw them, barring them from citizenship for 21 years and from holding office altogether. In other words, they wanted to separate immigration from citizenship, so as to create a quasi-permanent class of foreigners. Hmmmmm…isn’t that what a guestworker program is supposed to do? And so doesn’t the Know-Nothing label properly apply to a different group in today’s immigration debate?