Actually it was very similar, the immigrants back then were Italian and Irish and they were poor and accused of the exact same things we accuse today's immigrants of laziness, drinking, lack of patriotism to their new country, rudeness, too many kids, and a 'foreign' religion, as most of them were Roman Catholic in what was then a predominantly Protestant nation.
There were also Eastern Europeans, Jews and Eastern Orthodox and they had the same charges flung against them, except that the Jews were accused of being wealthy, even when they lived in the same circumstances as the rest of the immigrants.
