¶ … American Immigration
Globally, the United States has been known as "a nation of immigrants" almost from its inception. Beginning in the 1600s with English Puritans and continuing today, America is a melting pot of culture and ethnicity. In fact, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigration was the major source of U.S. population growth. Looking over our 200+ years we find that to clearly be true, with approximately 1 million immigrants coming to America during the 17th and 18th century. Almost 3 million arrived during the 1860s, and another 3 million in the 1870s. In the next four decades, the number of immigrants rose to over 25 million people, most from various European nations, most arriving in New York or one of the Eastern seaports (Damon, 1981). Despite the politicization, as of 2006, the United States actually was the number one country globally to accept legal immigrants into the country, with a current immigrant population of almost 40 million (Terrazas and Batalova, 2009). In fact, the peak of immigration was 1907, when over 1.2 million Europeans entered the country -- beginning a push towards legislation limiting immigration in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924 and the 1921 Congressional Quota Act. These immigrants came for two sociological reasons: the push factor (wars, famine, persecution and overpopulation) and the pull factors (jobs and the promise of freedom). Most came by ship, and a passage often cost the equivalent of an...
Many Europeans left their home countries because of changes in their circumstances, others the promise of the "American Dream" in a new land with newer opportunities and, they heard, social benefits. America was viewed as being more open and tolerant of religious and ethnic differences, and stories of great wealth from jobs on the Eastern Seaboard poured back into Europe. In fact, many immigrants did find a better life in America, but many did not. Many stayed in squalid ghettos in the major U.S. cities, but many moved West to help settle the new frontier (Volo).
From the U.S. perspective, though, prior to 1890, most (over 80%) of the immigrants came from north and Western Europe. After 1900-1905, though, more immigrants came from Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe; had different languages and skill sets that previous immigrants, and increased animosity and prejudice so greatly that Congress limited immigration from certain areas. Many of the European groups actually found conditions in America to be intolerable -- they were ghettoized, harassed, found themselves disenfranchised from the language and socio-political developments, and prey from immigrant "thugs" who controlled neighborhood tenements. Ghettoization of language and culture…
