"Over the first half of the nineteenth century, even as Americans developed progressively sharper critiques of immigration, they nevertheless retained a basic faith in the fundamental moral natures of immigrants and in the capacity of American economic and political institutions to transform foreign migrants into patriotic republicans. The problems associated with European immigration were generally considered fatal neither to the nation's historically liberal immigration and naturalization policy, nor to the regeneration narrative that underwrote that liberality. So long as immigrants were properly diffused throughout the nation, contemporaries maintained, the warm bath of economic freedom and republican political fellowship would dissolve away the residue of Old World economic and political oppression, and infuse them with economic and political independence, habits of strenuous labor, and devotion to their adopted nation. It was only in the late 1840s and 1850s that a politically robust nativist movement gained broad support and political influence. There began to take hold a critique of immigrants as fundamentally, irredeemably foreign, animated by a deep suspicion that they either carried no "dormant seed of virtue" as a matter of nature, or, if they once had, that it had atrophied beyond any hope or revival. Although the nativist movement was ultimately unsuccessful in its primary policy demand-the extension of the period of residency required for naturalization-and was soon swallowed up by the Civil War and the increased demand for immigrant labor, it nevertheless represents an important chapter in the legal construction of foreignness."