"In contrast to the immigration restriction movement of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the 1850s even those critics who were most skeptical of immigrants' capacity for assimilation usually advocated limiting access to American citizenship rather than excluding immigrants from American territory. ' Foreigners' "opinions need to be recast before they [can] intelligently participate in public affairs," wrote the Know Nothing Anspach. "[E]ven a residence of fifteen or more years is absolutely essential in most instances before a man can vote intelligently," he counseled. Indeed, to the extent that leading nativists sought to reduce the number of immigrants entering the country, they proposed to do so not by restricting immigration per se, but rather by removing the "inducements" furnished by "[t]he existing laws of naturalization, by which the meanest serf of Europe could be converted into a voter in five years. "'This exclusive focus on naturalization stands in sharp contrast to the anti-immigrant program of the 1880s and 1890s, in which foreign laborers' very presence on American territory-and particularly their participation in the labor market-threatened to corrode republican institutions. Despite the intensity of the nativist fervor, it faded from political prominence as rapidly as it had emerged. The nation's enduring, if increasingly cautious, faith in assimilation combined with the surging labor demands of the Civil War to submerge for another generation the immigration illiberalism of the 1850s."