Xenophobia is nothing new. As soon as humans started dividing themselves up into groups, the very next decision was usually how much better they were than that other group. The first cavemen who lived in the northern caves were probably telling offensive, weird "eastern cave-dweller" jokes.

It is a little bit sad that the United States wasn't even ten years old when it was making laws specifically to keep out foreigners. The fact that the US is a nation of immigrants (with the major exception of Native Americans, of course) wasn't something that was considered at the time.

By modern standards, people back then were shockingly racist.

However, there was a tiny germ of rhyme and reason behind the xenophobia. The Naturalization Act didn't create the waiting period between announcement and citizenship; it merely extended what was already there to what most people would agree was an irrationally long time…especially based on the amount of time the United States had been a country.

Every couple years, a foreign-born politician gets popular enough to lead to the questioning of the part of the Constitution that mandates the president be "native-born." The founders put that in because they didn't want foreign loyalists hijacking their brand new country. That makes a tiny bit of sense, and even more if you remember that in the absence of anyone else, the founders would be the ones in charge.

The idea behind Naturalization is somewhat similar, though it's even on flimsier ground. It basically comes back to the idea that foreign-born people can't be trusted because they're foreign. This is, of course, utter nonsense. Foreign-born people who become citizens are as American as it gets. After all, they chose to be American; others were just born here.