“Remember, remember, always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1938 speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Roosevelt could have been speaking of almost any state along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States — particularly Rhode Island. Those words resonate today.

This photo, taken between 1890 and 1910, shows Italian immigrants in the U.S. Customs shed at Fields Point in Providence.

Journal file photo

Unless you are a Narragansett Indian or other native American, every Rhode Islander is the descendant of an immigrant. The state’s first white settler was Roger Williams, a Baptist preacher and immigrant of conscience who was booted out of Massachusetts because he disagreed with the Puritan theocrats who ran that colony.

Williams had the notion, remarkable for his time, that church and state ought to be clearly separate. “Forced religion stinks in the nostrils of God,” Williams said. He founded Providence in 1636.

Almost four centuries later, Rhode Islanders are locked in a sharp debate about the latest group of immigrants to come here, many to work illegally. The volume has been turned up since federal immigration authorities arrested 360 alleged illegal immigrant workers at a March 6 raid at a New Bedford textile factory.

At the State House, opponents of illegal immigration — upset at the lack of enforcement by Washington — are pushing for state laws that would force employers to verify the citizenship of prospective employees, impose criminal penalties on employers who hire illegal workers and require English as the state’s official language.

Some Rhode Islanders angry about these new immigrants — many of whom are from Latin America — argue that things were different when their forebears came to the United States. Yet, expert opinion and a review of historical records show that when it comes to immigration everything old is new again.

In the warm bath of nostalgia, descendants of European and Canadian immigrants often assert that their forebears came here legally, learned English quickly and stayed to raise stable nuclear families.

This is largely myth. For some, the American Dream meant coming here to earn some money and finance a better life back home. But many went back and forth for years depending on the availability of work and the vagaries of love or family ties. One in four immigrants before the 1920s would return home; for Italians, it could be as high as 45 percent. Steamships from Europe docked often in Providence, and trains carried the French back to Quebec.

Immigrants, especially Roman Catholics, faced withering hostility from native Yankees. With the exception of the Chinese, who were banned from U.S. immigration in 1882, there really was no such thing as an “illegal” immigrant until the 1920s, when Protestant natives, alarmed at the increase in new arrivals from southern Europe, particularly Italy, persuaded the U.S. government to slam the door on immigration and enforce deportation laws.

“Before the 1920s, 97 percent of immigrants were admitted and very, very few were sent back,” says the Rev. Robert Hayman, professor of history at Providence College and an expert on Rhode Island’s immigrant ethnic groups. “About the only reasons you would be sent home would be if you were sick or criminally insane.”

Just about every immigrant group had the same experience. The first generation endured discrimination in almost every realm of life and at work, where they toiled as maids, gardeners and maintenance workers or as low-paid factory employees.

Because they were foreign-born, they weren’t allowed to vote in Rhode Island until late in the 19th century. Even then, foreign-born immigrants had to own at least $134 worth of real estate — a significant hurdle for poorly paid workers — before they could vote. Those restrictions were not removed from local election laws until 1928.

“In immigration, history tends to be repeated,” says Evelyn Sterne, a University of Rhode Island history professor who has studied immigration in Rhode Island. “This recent uproar about illegal immigrants is nothing new. Nativism has always been present. Every ethnic group faced hostility, in varying degrees.”

By 1905, 7 out of every 10 Rhode Islanders were either first- or second-generation Americans. A state census that year showed that Rhode Island had become the first state in the nation to have a Roman Catholic majority. The 1910 census calculated the number of immigrants at almost 180,000, or substantially more than the 119,000 foreign-born state residents counted by the 2000 census.

THE IRISH were the first Roman Catholics to come to the state in large numbers. Between 1810 and 1845, about 5,000 Irish settled in the state, working as coal diggers in Portsmouth, railroad builders in Providence and ditch diggers on the Blackstone Canal.

The Irish exodus accelerated in the mid-1840s when the potato blight hit Ireland. By 1855, more than 1 million Irish Catholics had reached the United States; a decade later, Rhode Island’s Irish population was more than 27,000, or about two-thirds of all foreign-born residents.

“It seems hard to believe today, when the Irish are the most assimilated of just about any ethnic group. But when they first came here, they were hated, looked down upon as vermin,” says Scott Molloy, a URI professor and Rhode Island historian. “The Irish were often described as simian or ape-like.”

By the mid-1850s, the secretive anti-Catholic movement known as the Know Nothings won all statewide political offices.

Until 1887, The Providence Journal ran “No Irish Need Apply” employment ads. The newspaper’s editor, Henry Bowen Anthony, editorialized against the Irish immigrants, calling them “foreign vagabonds” who would never assimilate into larger American society.

After the Civil War, Rhode Island’s economy swelled. Immigrants swarmed into the state from around the world. Waiting for them here was the brutal energy of unfettered capitalism: factory jobs producing woolens and cotton, forging metals and machine tools and crafting jewelry.

French-Canadians from Quebec, where the farm-based economy could no longer support the growing population, were recruited to work in textile factories. Mill owners sent recruiters to Quebec, promising a “better life” in the mills of New England. Many settled in Woonsocket, Pawtucket, Warren and West Warwick. No one was much concerned about their citizenship status.

“One of the big misconceptions about immigrants is that they started speaking English the minute they walked off the boat,” says Molloy.

French-Canadians hewed fiercely to their ethnic identity and tried to preserve their language, religion and church schools. The leaders of the Franco-American community fought with Irish bishops and, sometimes, with Protestant political figures.

Life in the mills wasn’t easy; 12-hours days were the norm, amid the mind-dulling noise of a power loom. Factories were freezing in winter and sweatshops in summer.

The nasty secret behind Rhode Island’s flourishing textile economy was the state’s shameful record of child labor. Small hands and tiny fingers worked in the mills, creating lives of luxury for factory owners. By the dawn of the 20th century, Rhode Island relied on child labor to a greater degree than any other state in the industrial Northeast.

Mill owners had the General Assembly in thrall and legislators refused to enact laws banning child labor.

Children quit school to work in factories and lost limbs in machinery. It was the price of supporting immigrant families.

Life was fine for native Protestant males, but for the newly arrived and ambitious women, things were not so great. Women couldn’t vote and were excluded from the top rungs of politics and business.

Government provided few social services beyond public education. Churches, ethnic organizations and the local Democratic political machines helped impoverished immigrants get food, jobs and medical care.

IF DEBATES over bilingual education seem contentious nowadays, consider Woonsocket in the 1920s. The Yankee-controlled state government in 1922 passed the Peck Act, an “English only” law requiring all children — even those in parochial schools — to be taught in English. Yankee political figures were reacting to the fact that many new military recruits in World War I did not have good English skills.

French Catholic priests disagreed with the act. They believed a French child who lost his native language would lose his faith. So they mounted a bitter protest. The issue divided the French community and wasn’t resolved until 1928, when the Vatican stepped in and ordered the French Catholics of Woonsocket to obey the law and teach their children in English.

Still, as late as the 1950s and 1960s, French was the language of the streets and elderly gathering spots of Woonsocket. Today, the city’s French and industrial past can still be viewed at the Museum of Work and Culture, located in a red brick former textile dye house.

WHILE THE FRENCH and Irish had large communities by the end of the Civil War, Italians would not arrive en masse until after the 1880s. As was the case with the French-Canadians, Italians fought to keep their language alive, particularly in religious observances. The state’s religious history is fraught with battles between Italian Catholics and Irish bishops over the demand for priests who spoke Italian.

“The bishops didn’t like the ethnic parishes, but in the end they figured it was better to have immigrants in ethnic parishes than not in church,” said Sterne, the URI professor.

By 1905, nearly 20,000 Italians were living on Federal Hill. They were jammed into triple-decker tenements along narrow streets in the same buildings that once housed a fledgling Irish community, whose members had earned enough money to move up and out.

Ethnic Rhode Island in those days was less melting pot than mosaic. Immigrants lived mostly in neighborhoods defined by ethnicity and married within their own group.

The Irish, Italians and French-Canadians made up the largest immigrant communities, but by the turn of the 20th century, Rhode Island was also home to Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe, Poles, Swedes, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, Syrians, Lebanese, Germans, Ukrainians, Greeks and Armenians.

After World War I, native Republican Protestants fought back against the Catholic immigrants. In 1924, the U.S. Congress shut immigration down to a trickle, setting quotas designed to keep out Italians and other southern Europeans. The new law favored immigrants from the British Isles, Ireland and Canada.

A post-war Red Scare fueled the view that every immigrant was a potential subversive, anarchist or communist.

Rhode Island in the 1920s witnessed a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike in southern states of the Old Confederacy, the Klan in Rhode Island was aimed at Catholics. A crowd of 8,000 gathered at a Klan rally in Foster in 1924.

While Protestants saw immigration as a threat to their culture and political and religious dominance, there was also an element of economic competition — the same threat that fuels some of today’s antipathy toward illegal workers. So many immigrants had flooded the United States and its labor markets that wages declined for native workers, says Peter Skerry, a Boston College professor and expert in immigration.

The 1920s immigration legislation discriminated against eastern and southern Europeans, but the results were worse for workers from Hispanic countries, particularly Mexico. Fears of “race-mixing” and taking jobs from natives led to Hispanics being considered a racial class of undesirables, writes Mae Ngai, a University of Chicago professor.

IMMIGRATION LAW was overhauled in 1965 and the national quotas were abolished. But today, entering the United States legally and qualifying for citizenship is a complex and cumbersome process. This has become particularly the case since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

For example, if you are a U.S. citizen and are seeking citizenship for a brother or sister, the current waiting list is 12 years. People with advanced skills, such as scientists, doctors or professors, can gain legal entrance to the United States much more easily than unskilled workers.

Another route to permanent residency is the so-called “millionaire category.” This requires foreign nationals to invest $1 million, create 10 jobs for people not related to them, and prove they have done so.The latest estimates are that 12 million to 14 million immigrants are in the United States illegally. Government statistics show that about 16,000 illegal immigrants live in Rhode Island, but because they are not supposed to be here, no one is certain how many there are, says Jeff Neal, spokesman for Governor Carcieri.

Despite the poverty of such Providence neighborhoods as the South Side and Elmwood, a new generation of immigrants, driven by hope and jobs, has moved to the city from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. Walk down Broad Street, on the South Side, 50 years ago and one would have seen the names of businesses that live only in memory and family lore: Cohen’s Market, Hanley’s Tap, Moran’s Bakery. Stroll that street today and see the signs for Sanchez Market, Hernandez Liquors, El Maleçon Restaurant.

The South Side neighborhood is a storied Providence immigrant stronghold that has been dominated over time by Yankee, Irish, Jewish, African-American and, now, Hispanic residents.

Hispanics live in the same wood-frame triple deckers inhabitated by earlier generations of immigrants. State Sen. Juan Pichardo, D-Providence, one of the political leaders of Dominican descent, is fond of saying that Hispanics are the “new” Italians. “They had Atwells Avenue and Federal Hill, and we have Broad Street.”

smackay@projo.com