Brief History of immigration into the US

A Brief History of Immigration into the US

Immigration in the first half of the 19th century

Immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Immigration from the 1920s to the Present

Native Americans

The earliest inhabitants of North America are the Native American ethnic groups, whose ancestors arrived from Siberia across the Bering Strait (which was not covered by water at the time due to lower sea levels) at least 12,000 years ago, and gradually spread across the whole continent down to the tip of South America. In North America, the most sophisticated cultures emerged in Central Mexico and in the Yucatán peninsula: no high culture comparable to the Aztecs or the Maya developed in the territory of the present US. North American Indians lived in small communities called tribes which consisted of clans (group of related families). Their lifestyle strongly depended on their natural surroundings.

Most tribes living in the woodlands east of the Mississippi combined hunting and fishing (practiced by men) with the gathering of nuts and berries as well as hoe agriculture growing corn, beans and squash (practiced by women). They typically had temporary villages and their population remained relatively small, scattered over large territories.

Native American tribes living on the Great Plains developed a nomadic lifestyle. They followed and hunted the buffalo herds that roamed the prairie, and utilized almost all parts of the animals, eating their meat, using their hides for clothes and tepees (Indian tents) and their bones for tools. After the Spanish colonizers brought horses to North America in the 16^th century (earlier, the largest domesticated animals in the continent had been dogs and llamas), Plains Indians living west of the Mississippi quickly adopted them, which made their nomadic lifestyle significantly easier.

Square Tower House in Navajo Canyon, Mesa Verde National Park

The Native American tribes living in the Southwest lived in pueblos, or permanent villages consisting of stone buildings, and practiced subsistence agriculture. Their architectural skills were the most advanced in North America, but their social and cultural development was limited by the dry climate and the poor soil. After 1500 nomadic tribes moved into the region from the north: they mostly kept herds of sheep and goats which could survive on the poorer vegetation.

Despite the variety of their lifestyle, the North American Indians shared several key social and cultural traits. They knew how to make clay pots and dishes, and made their tools out of stone, wood and animal bones. Their typical weapons were spears, knives, bows and arrows. After they came into contact with European colonists, they adopted many of their domesticated animals and their more advanced metal tools and weapons. But Native Americans in North America never learned metalwork or other advanced technologies, never practiced intensive agriculture, they never developed any writing system on their own, and did not build any cities or large permanent settlements. As a result, they were seen by European colonists as culturally inferior people who occupy far more territory than they need or make use of. This way, whites felt justified to occupy “unused” land and chase away Native Americans from their traditional habitat. The history of European settlement in North America is also the history of the decline of Native American ethnic groups. Some of them were almost wiped out by diseases brought in by Europeans (especially smallpox), others were killed in wars against colonists, or were forced to move into areas which were less suitable for their way of life (e.g. the removal of Indian tribes from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s). In the late 19^th century, all remaining Native Americans were ordered by the federal government to move into reservations, areas reserved for them and overseen by federal authorities. Most of these reservations were located in areas with the least favourable conditions (mountains and deserts), where they were dependent on government supplies. As a result, the number of Native American population in the US became almost insignificant by the 20^th century.

For further information on Native Americans, see

Immigration in colonial times

In the two centuries after the discovery of the American continent by Europeans, three nations took the largest part in the colonization of North America: Spain, France and England (see Timeline of US History). Spanish conquistadors were the first to establish a permanent settlement in Florida, which remained a Spanish colony until the early 19^th century, and they also explored the Southwest of the US, creating settlements in present-day New Mexico. But besides these two areas of the present US, Spain concentrated its efforts on Mexico. The St. Lawrence river was discovered French explorers, and subsequent French colonization focused on the river valley and the Great Lakes area (called Canada), and from the 18^th century, to the lower Mississippi valley (called Louisiana). Since both the Spanish and the French were rivals of the English in the colonization of North America, the English colonies received very few immigrants from these two countries: the only significant group of French-speaking Americans live in the state of Louisiana.

The English colonies were established along the east coast of the North American continent between Canada and Florida during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The two earliest settlements were Virginia in the south (where Jamestown was founded in 1607) and New England in the north (where Plymouth was founded in 1620), and other areas were gradually occupied (for details, see Timeline of US history). Although the majority of the settlers came from England, and later from Britain (including a significant proportion of Scottish and Protestant Irish immigrants), the population of the colonies was never purely English-speaking or purely white. A significant number of Dutch people lived in and around New York, while Protestant Germans made up one-third of the population of Pennsylvania, and all the Southern colonies imported a large number of black slaves from West Africa and the Caribbean. New England, the northernmost group of colonies, remained the most homogeneous in ethnic character, populated mostly by English Puritans.

At the time of the first American census in 1790, about 3.9 million people lived in the newly independent United States. About 750,000 or 19% were blacks, mostly slaves. Of the 3.15 million whites, 2.45 million identified themselves by nationality: 83% of them had English or Welsh origins, 7% Scottish, 6% German, 2% Dutch and 1% Irish (For source, see ). As the data show, American society during and after the War of Independence was dominated by English-speaking people who were almost exclusively Protestant. The oldest European immigrants remained an elite group within US society, often referred to as WASPs, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Immigration in the first half of the 19^th century

In the early years of the 19^th century, European immigration to the United States was insignificant. Britain was hostile to its newly independent colony, whereas the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (1798–1815) and the subsequent British blockade on Continental ports made immigration very difficult. The importation of black slaves was also banned by Congress in 1808, and even though illegal smuggling continued, large numbers of blacks no longer arrived from West Africa or the Caribbean.

Immigration began to increase after 1830, but the first huge wave of Europeans reached the US in the 1840s and 1850s. The main reason was the Potato Famine in Ireland (1845–49), which caused mass starvation, and forced millions of people to emigrate from the country. Between 1840 and 1860, about 1.7 million Irish came to the US. The second largest source was Germany, which at this time was divided into many small states, and a lot of people felt disappointed after the failure of the 1848 revolutions which tried to reunite the country. Between 1840 and 1860, about 1.4 million Germans arrived in the US. Significant numbers came also from Great Britain. As a result of the big wave, the proportion of foreign-born people within US population grew from an estimated 5% in 1840 to more than 13% in 1860 (and it would remain around that figure until 1920). The immigrants who arrived between 1840 and 1860 are sometimes called “Old Immigrants”, since they are seen as the earliest large group of immigrants in the history of the independent US (those whose ancestors had come to the British colonies before 1775 considered themselves “native Americans” by the mid-19^th century).

Most Irish immigrants were poor peasants, who could not afford to buy land on their own, therefore they settled in large cities along the East Coast, especially in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Contrary to earlier Irish immigrants, the Irish arriving after 1840 were predominantly Catholic, forming the first large non-Protestant ethnic group in the US. As a result of their poverty and their Catholicism, they encountered a lot of hostility and negative prejudices. They were uneducated and unskilled, often illiterate, therefore they could only get heavy manual labor. The men worked in factories and on construction projects; the women also became factory workers (especially in textile and clothing) or household servants. In the late 19^th century, many Irishmen joined the ranks of the police. The Protestant majority was highly suspicious of Irish Catholics, and anti-Catholic propaganda was widespread in this period. Conflicts between Irish Catholics and Protestants occasionally burst out in open riots.

The German immigrants were more varied in their social and religious background and they were more attracted to the western frontier. Many of them settled in the Midwest, especially in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Ohio, but also in Texas and California, where they bought farms or founded entirely German towns. Many others moved into cities, and Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati became large centers of German-Americans. The majority of them were Protestant, mostly Lutheran, but about one-third were Catholic and some of them Jewish. They contributed significantly to American cuisine: hamburgers and hot dogs were both originally German foods, and many of the popular beer breweries were founded by German immigrants.

In the 1850s, a significant number of Chinese immigrants began to arrive in California, attracted by the gold rush and other job opportunities in the fast developing state. They worked on farms and in industry, built the transcontinental railroad, opened shops and laundries. Most of the Chinese were concentrated in San Francisco and California, but they soon moved to large cities on the East Coast too. They were the earliest group of Asian immigrants to the US, but they were soon confronted with hostility, especially during the economic downturn after the Civil War, when whites felt that the Chinese are taking jobs away from them. In 1882, Congress passed a law which banned Chinese immigrants from entering the country: it was the first federal law restricting free immigration to the US.

Immigration in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, NY, in 1902

The Civil War brought a temporary decline in immigration but numbers began to grow again in the 1870s. After 1880, however, the ethnic origins of European immigration started to change: while Germans and Irish continued to come, more and more people arrived from Scandinavia, Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The second wave of immigration reached its peak between 1905 and 1915, when an average of one million immigrants arrived in the country each year. The largest ethnic groups were the Italians, the Poles, and the Jews, but significant numbers of other Eastern and Southern European groups (Czechs, Hungarians, Russians, Lithuanians, Greeks etc.) also entered the country. This was the largest wave of European immigration in the history of the US, and those who came in this period are often called ‘New Immigrants’, to distinguish them from the mid-19^th century arrivals.

The New Immigrants had a wide variety of ethnic and religious background. The Italians mostly came from from Southern Italy and Sicily, and were devout Catholics. There were many different Slavic groups, who spoke related languages, but often belonged to different churches: most Poles, Czechs and Slovaks were Catholic, but Russians or Ukranians were Orthodox. The Greeks also followed the Orthodox faith. The Jews, who came from several different countries (mostly from the Russian Empire, but also from Austria-Hungary and Germany) had their own religion, Judaism. Only the Scandinavians (Swedes, Norwegians, Danes) and some of the Hungarians belonged to Protestant churches.

Despite all this variety, the social background of the immigrants was remarkably similar. They were almost all poor peasants, who left their homeland because they wanted to escape from poverty and find better opportunities in the US. Some of them, like the Poles or the Jews, also fled from political oppression or religious persecution. They were uneducated and unskilled, did not speak English, so they became poorly paid industrial workers, just like the Irish half a century earlier. They were culturally very different from the Protestant America, which received them with alarm, fear and suspicion. Since most of the free western lands had been occupied by that time, the New Immigrants mostly crowded into the big industrial cities of the East Coast and the Great Lakes area. New York became the most mixed city, but the poorer parts of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and several other prosperous industrial cities were filled with ethnic neighbourhoods populated by one single ethnic group. These districts were often nicknamed ‘Little Italy’ or ‘Little Warsaw’; here, the immigrants could use their own mother tongue among themselves and had a sense of relative security in their unknown and sometimes hostile new country.

Immigrants at Ellis Island, NY in 1904

The social pressures and political tensions created by mass immigration urged the federal government to try to control this massive wave. In 1891, Congress created the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS ), which opened a screening station in 1892 on Ellis Island in New York harbor. Ellis Island became the primary port of entry for millions of immigrants in the next 60 years (it was closed in 1954; today it is a museum). Here, all immigrants had to show their passports or other official documents and underwent a medical examination. They could be rejected if they were ill or they had no papers to identify themselves. Many New Immigrants remembered their days spent on Ellis Island as an anxious, fearful time, when they were worried about their future and the possible rejection by the authorities.

The New Immigrants significantly changed the ethnic and religious makeup of the United States, bringing a huge amount of additional diversity into an already diverse country. Catholicism became a major church in the US as a result, and New York City had the largest concentration of Jews in the world. The social changes were reflected by the census of 1920. The total population of the US was over 105 million, 10% of which consisted of blacks. Other races were insignificant in number. The white population amounted to more than 94 million people, but only 62% of them were native-born Americans whose parents were also born in the country. 24% were second-generation immigrants, whose parents or at least one of them were born abroad, and over 14%, almost 14 million people were first-generation immigrants who were born outside the US. The largest source countries of foreign-born people were Germany (1.7 million), Italy (1.6 million), Russia (1.4 million), Poland (1.1 million) and Ireland (1 million), followed by England, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Norway. It is important to note, however, that source countries do not always identify nationality: most of the Jews came from Russia and Poland, for example (Source: ).

Immigration from the 1920s to the Present

During World War I, immigration temporarily declined, but after 1920 it began to grow again. There was a growing public pressure on politicians to stop the influx of Southern and Eastern European poor people into American cities who were willing to work for very low wages and ‘imported social problems’ into the US. The isolationist Congress passed two Immigration Acts in 1921 and 1924, severely limiting the so far mostly unrestricted flow of European immigrants. The Act of 1924 introduced a quota system for each country: the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country were limited at 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the US according to the census of 1890. Since the big wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration began after 1890, the Act deliberately cut off further immigration from those countries (e.g. Italians only received 4,000 visas), whereas it offered generous quotas for Britain, Ireland and Germany, which they did not fill. Immigration of Asians (primarily Japanese) was effectively banned. All immigrants had to obtain visas at US embassies abroad before immigration. After 1927, a maximum limit of 150,000 immigrants per year was introduced and the census data of 1920 became the basis of the 2% rule.

The 1924 Act, which remained in effect until after World War II, was a turning point in the history of immigration to the US: it drastically reduced immigration from Europe, with the result that the proportion of whites stopped growing, and slowly began to decline after World War II. The quotas and other limitations did not apply to people coming from the American continent, because western farmers lobbied successfully for cheap immigrant laborers from Mexico. This gave rise to a steadily growing influx of immigrants from Latin America.

Besides the restrictive laws, the Great Depression which began in 1929 also drastically reduced immigration, since the US suffered the greatest economic collapse in its history. During the 1930s, the annual number of immigrants often fell below 100,000. During World War II, the US received some political refugees from Europe, but refused to give immigration visas to tens of thousands of German Jews, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.

After the war, although official quotas remained in force, the strict maximum limits were softened by creating a special status for political refugees from war-torn Europe, and later from Korea and Cuba. In the 1950s, the US government started the first federal operation to capture and expel ‘wetbacks’, or illegal immigrants from Mexico who mostly crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. Despite the efforts, immigration from Mexico continued to grow, unlimited by federal laws.

The national-origins quotas were finally abolished in 1965. The new immigration law replaced the old system with two separate maximum limits for the Eastern and the Western Hemisphere (the latter means the American continent, the former the rest of the world). It also introduced a complicated set of preferences for relatives of people already living in the US and continued to allow special status for political refugees. The most important impact of the new law was that it opened the doors for Asian countries: Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Chinese, Asian Indians (people from the Republic of India) and other groups began to immigrate to the US in continually increasing numbers. Most of them settled on the West Coast, especially in Southern California, where they typically operated small shops and other businesses. Although the law introduced limits to Latin American immigration for the first time, it was unable to reduce the flow of Mexicans across the border, as well as the immigration of Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans, and other groups, typically from the Caribbean and Central America.

By the 1980s, more than 80% of all immigrants arrived either from Asia or Latin America, and this number did not include illegal Mexican immigrants. Mexican immigration reached such a magnitude that Congress passed a new Immigration Act in 1986 with the explicit purpose of reducing the influx of poor Mexicans. The law introduced penalties for employers who hired illegal immigrants in the hope that this way businesses could be scared away from employing illegal Mexicans. At the same time, the law offered amnesty, legal status and ultimately full citizenship for those illegal aliens who had been living and working in the country for at least four years. The law, however, turned out to be a failure, because the attraction of higher standards of living in the US proved stronger than fears from deportation. Also, many illegal immigrants hoped for a new wave of amnesty.

As a result of the immigration trends of the 20^th century, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites has been reduced to about 70% of the total US population by 2000. In the meantime, Hispanics have overtaken blacks to become the second largest group with c. 13% of the population. The proportion of blacks remained relatively steady, around 12%, while the proportion of Asians also grew significantly, to 4% of the total population. Native Americans and other races make up no more than 1% of the entire US population (for details, see Races).

Sources:

J.A. Henretta―W. E. Brownlee―D. Brody―S. Ware, America's History. Vol. 1 to 1877. 2nd Edition. New York: Worth Publishers, 1993.

M.B. Norton―D.M. Katzman―P.D. Escott―H.P. Chudacoff―T.G. Paterson―W.M. Tuttle, Jr., A People and a Nation. A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986.

E. Fiedler―R. Jansen―M. Norman-Risch, America in Close-Up. 2nd Edition. London: Longman, 2001.

Internet resources