History of immigration to the United States Immigration 1850 to 1930 "From the Old to the New World" shows German emigrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg, to New York.Harperʼs Weekly, (New York) November 7, 1874 Demography Between 1850 and 1930, about 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States with a peak in the years between 1881 and 1885, when a million Germans left Germany and settled mostly in the Midwest. Between 1820 and 1930, 3.5 million British and 4.5 million Irish entered America. Before 1845 most Irish immigrants were
Protestants. After 1845, Irish Catholics began arriving in large numbers, largely driven by the Great Famine. [20] After 1870 steam powered larger and faster ships, with lower fares. Meanwhile far, improvements southern and eastern Europe created surplus populations that needed to move on. As usual, young people age 15 to 30 predominated among the newcomers. This wave of migration, which constituted the third episode in the history of U.S. immigration, could better be referred to as a flood of immigrants, as nearly 25 million Europeans made the voyage. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 4 million Jews. Each group evinced a distinctive migration pattern in terms of the gender balance within the migratory pool, the permanence of their migration, their literacy rates, the balance between adults and children, and the like. But they shared one overarching characteristic: They flocked to urban destinations and made up the bulk of the U.S. industrial labor pool, making possible the emergence of such industries as steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production, and enabling the United States to leap into the front ranks of the worldʼs economic giants. Their urban destinations, their numbers, and perhaps a fairly basic human antipathy towards foreigners led to the emergence of a second wave of organized xenophobia. By the 1890s, many Americans, particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, nativeborn, considered immigration to pose a serious danger to the nationʼs health and security. In 1893 a group of them formed the Immigration Restriction League, and it, along with other similarly inclined organizations, began to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration. Irish and German Catholic immigration was opposed in the 1850s by the Nativist/Know Nothing movement, originating in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to American values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. Active mainly from 1854 56, it
strived to curb immigration and naturalization, though its efforts met with little success. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class and Protestant membership fragmented over the issue of slavery, most often joining the Republican Party by the time of the 1860 presidential election. [21][22] European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers, including 177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 born in Ireland. [23] Many Germans could see the parallel between slavery and serfdom in the old fatherland. [24] Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French Canadians left Quebec to immigrate to the United States and settle, mainly in New England. Considering that the population of Quebec was only 892,061 in 1851, this was a massive exodus. 13.6 million Americans claimed to have French ancestry in the 1980 census. A large proportion of them have ancestors who emigrated from French Canada, since immigration from France was low throughout the history of the United States. Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, some states started to pass their own immigration laws, which prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in 1875 that immigration was a federal responsibility. [25] In 1875, the nation passed its first immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, also known as the Asian Exclusion Act, outlawing the importation of unwilling Chinese women for sex slavery. [26] In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act stated that there was a limited amount of immigrants of Chinese descent allowed into the United States for 10 years. Prior to 1890, the individual states, rather than the Federal government, regulated immigration into the United States. [27] The Immigration Act of 1891 established a Commissioner of Immigration in the Treasury Department. [28]
Late 19th Century broadside advertisement offering cheap farm land to immigrants; few went to Texas after 1860. The Dillingham Commission was instituted by the United States Congress in 1907 to investigate the effects of immigration on the country. The Commission's analysis of American immigration during the previous three decades led it to conclude that the major source of immigration had shifted from northern and western Europeans to southern and eastern Europeans. It was, however, apt to generalizations about regional groups that were subjective and failed [citation needed] to differentiate between distinct cultural attributes. The 1910s marked the high point of Italian immigration to the United States. Over two million Italians immigrated in those years, with a total of 5.3 million between 1880 and 1920. [29][30] About a third returned to Italy, after working an average of five years in the U.S. About 1.5 million Swedes and Norwegians immigrated to the United States within this period, due to opportunity in America and poverty and religious oppression in united Sweden-Norway. This accounted for around 20% of the total population of the kingdom at that time. They settled mainly in the Midwest, especially Minnesota and the Dakotas. Danes had comparably low immigration rates due to a
better economy; after 1900 many Danish immigrants were Mormon converts who moved to Utah. In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the early 1900s, Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at the American relatives beckoning them to the United States. Over two million Jews fled the pogroms of therussian Empire to the safety of the U.S. from 1881-1924. Over two million Eastern Europeans, mainly Catholics and Jews, immigrated between 1880 and 1924. People of Polish ancestry are the largest Eastern European ancestry group in the United States. Immigration of Eastern Orthodox ethnic groups was much lower. Lebanese and Syrian immigrants started to settle in large numbers in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The vast majority of the immigrants from Lebanon and Syria were Christians, but smaller numbers of Jews, Muslims and Druze also settled. Many lived in New York City andboston. In the 1920s and 1930s, a large number of
these immigrants set out west, with Detroitgetting a large number of Middle Eastern immigrants, as well as many Midwestern areas where the Arabs worked as farmers. From 1880 to 1924, around two million Jews moved to the United States, mostly seeking better opportunity in America and fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire. After 1934 Jews, along with any other above-quota immigration, were usually denied access to the United States. Congress passed a literacy requirement in 1917 to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from entering the country. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. This ultimately resulted in precluding the all "extra" immigration to the United States, including Jews fleeing Nazi German persecution. In 1924, quotas were set for European immigrants so that no more than 2% of the 1890 immigrant stocks were allowed into America. See also: National and ethnic cultures of Utah#National groups from Europe New Immigration Mulberry Street, along which Manhattan'sLittle Italy is centered. Lower East Side, circa 1900. "New immigration" was a term from the late 1880s that came from the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (areas that
previously sent few immigrants). [31] Some Americans feared the new arrivals. This raised the issue of whether the U.S. was still a "melting pot," or if it had just become a "dumping ground," and many old-stock Americans worried about negative effects on the economy, politics and culture. [32] Catholicism became a leading denomination 1860-1910. St. John Cantius, one of Chicago's "Polish Cathedrals" was one of the churches these new immigrants founded. Whiteness" See also: White ethnic The issue of whiteness arose after 1790 when the U.S. congress began to restrict naturalization to white persons. [33] While the requirements for naturalization changed over time, they still existed in one form or another until 1952. Between 1790 and 1952 there were a reported 52 cases that were brought before various courts arguing whether one was white. These cases not only forced the courts to define what a white persons was, but also explain why someone was white. [34] The courts offered many different explanations as to who was white. Over time two methods developed to help determine a persons
whiteness ; common knowledge and scientific evidence. Common knowledge was described as popular, widely held conceptions of race and racial divisions. Scientific evidence, on the other hand, dealt with the naturalistic studies of humankind. [35] These rationales both arose out of the court case In re Ah Yup decided in 1878 by the federal district of California. [36] By 1909 changes in immigration demographics and scientific definitions created a schism between common and scientific knowledge. [37] The court opted for common knowledge because scientific manipulation it believed had ignored racial differences by including under Caucasian far more [people] than the unscientific mind suspects even some persons the Court described as ranging in color from brown to black. [38] This shift from scientific knowledge to common knowledge demonstrated that, in the USA, ideas of race depended on social demarcations.