The US wasn't tolerant. I don't even know where to begin. A single comment cannot convey how anti-immigrant the US was.
Nativism took hold of the US when the Irish and Germans arrived (mainly due to religious reasons & also fear of cheaper labour) Given that Italians were majority Catholics, they'd have the same intolerance shown. The Chinese were also hounded.
Laws were passed to discriminate against all those groups.
The only people who possibly got off lightly were the British (due to same religion & culture)
I think it’s weird that the US seems to always have a struggle where there’s lots of racism but still makes some progress. For example, I figured that the current vitriol against immigration meant the US was some sort of racist hellhole limiting immigration but this article [0]states the census estimates 13.7% of the US wasn’t born in the US. And this Pew [1] article shows this as near the historic highs of 14.8% at the end of the 19th century. I think this is pretty cool and refreshing. So despite lots of heated statements, the US is improving in the number and quality of people immigrating.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-data-idUS... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/30/immigrant-s...
We have a 250 year precedent as an immigrant nation. We have always been at least somewhat tolerant of massive waves of migration, whether they were Germans, Italians, Irish, British, Chinese, etc. We have already lost any claim that our borders are lines in the sand for our socioethnic culture.
The only aspect of "American" culture that seems to be represented by our borders is a love of capitalism. And considering the fact that you can't really have capitalism with restricted trade and restricted movement of labor, it seems to me that Trump is more of a cultural invader than Salvadorans are.