"Immigrants were legally reconstructed as foreigners only in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Europeans and Chinese migrants alike increasingly became understood as fundamentally and permanently alien to the American character. In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans' long-standing confidence in the assimilative power of American institutions came into progressively sharper conflict with the economic and social realities of industrialization, including the triumph of the wage system; the deskilling of labor; and increasingly intense wage competition, often from recent immigrants. As contemporaries grappled with this conflict, they generally focused less on these broad structural economic changes than on the alleged economic pathologies of immigrants themselves-specifically, a disposition toward "uncivilized" standards of life and labor. Without the requisite economic conditions and racial material, critics argued, simply exposing immigrants to republican political culture and institutions afforded little value as a force of assimilation. As post-Civil War Americans re-imagined their polity as a social and political body, the health of which depended on the collective natural endowments of its constituent members, immigrants' foreignness came to signify more than merely the absence of citizenship; it became, instead, a token off fundamental, indelible moral difference."