European Immigration to America

10 Key excerpts on "European Immigration to America"

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  Essays in American Historiography. Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins

  • Donald Sheehan, Harold C. Syrett, Donald Sheehan, Harold C. Syrett(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  SOME ASPECTS OF EUROPEAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES by Carlton C. Qualey CARLETON COLLEGE NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA THE HISTORY of American immigration is more than the sum of the histories of the national group migrations. It is in a larger sense the history of America. Apart from the American abori-gines, who were themselves probably immigrant-descended, the American continents were occupied and developed by Europeans, Africans, and Asiatics. It was in large measure the interaction of American regional environments and immigrant group back-grounds that determined the character of the evolving American civilizations. In the history of continental United States, the nearly two centuries of English control established the legal-constitutional ideas and traditions that were combined with colonial experience to form the constitutional system that has endured to the present. The coming of large numbers of non-English during the colonial period—Germans, Scotch-Irish, Scots, Huguenot French, Swedes, Dutch, Jews, Africans, and others—did not significantly alter the basic institutional framework of the American governments, but these groups had important secondary influences that persisted far beyond the colonial period, most notably perhaps in the case of the Pennsylvania Germans. By the end of the colonial period, the population of the territory that was to become the United States was already a cosmopolitan one. 1 In the forty years after 1775, only about a quarter-million per-sons came to the United States—a trickle of Irish coming as return 154 QUALEY: EUROPEAN MIGRATION cargo on lumber ships plying between the Canadian Maritime Provinces and the British Isles, seamen off ships docking at Ameri-can ports, refugees from European revolutions and wars, dis-placed persons from the agricultural and early industrial changes in England, and many others, all imperfectly recorded.

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  The New Americans

  A Guide to Immigration since 1965

  • Mary C. Waters, Reed Ueda, Mary C. Waters, Reed Ueda, Helen B. Marrow(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Atlantic-to-Global Shift in American Immigration If “one were speaking of migrations,” explained the global historian Bruce Mazlish, “one would have to go back to the diasporas of the past to understand what is in- volved in many migrations today.” Applying a historical perspective to American immigration in the era of globalization reveals how it is the most recent part in a se-ries of migration contexts linked together chronologically in a developmental and causal pattern. Current immigration trends are an outgrowth of worldwide popula-tion movements—rising and falling, shifting and changing over several centuries— that have been generated by the actions of states and economies and by demo-graphic forces. The original context for American immigration sprang from the process of peopling the transatlantic empires created by Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands. From the 16th to the 18th century, the coerced migra-tion of the African slave trade and the voluntary immigration of European settlers built new creole societies and reduced the indigenous Amerindian population to minorities in these dominions. In the 19th century, the industrial revolution and the abolition of slavery in Eu-ropean empires reconfigured the international demand for settlers and laborers in New World societies. The origin points of Atlantic immigration were extended from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe, forming a wider migrant network that would supply labor to the factories and farms of devel-oping economies in the Western Hemisphere. From 1846 to 1932, 52 million Eu-ropean immigrants journeyed to overseas countries, and the U.S. received most of them. The ending of slavery in the British, French, and Spanish empires resulted in India and China becoming international suppliers of indentured labor to peripheral zones of economic development.

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  Understanding Immigration

  Issues and Challenges in an Era of Mass Population Movement

  • Marilyn Hoskin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Finally, the United States cannot escape the perception and reality of capacity rare in the world of advanced nations. Two hundred years of immigration to open territories and experiences with unanticipated newcomers have demonstrated an enviable ability to absorb outsiders. What makes current discussions about legal and illegal immigrants especially difficult is the fact that Americans have historically resisted monitoring any residents. Borders have always been porous and mechanisms to track foreigners minimal or nonexistent, yet those who have entered have historically become part of the fabric of society. If history defines a nation’s comfort level with immigration, the American version has established a foundation for seeing immigrants in ongoing and important roles. As this component of our framework aids understanding national options, it dictates recognition that immigration has consistently strengthened its economy and enriched its culture—even if its population has just as consistently been an initially grudging audience.

  Economic Factors in American Immigration

  In the often heated debates about immigration policies, recent or projected increases in admissions are commonly linked to grim economic forecasts. Communities fear unemployable hordes; workers worry about keeping their jobs; public agencies project hopeless outlooks for schools and health facilities. Casting immigrants as costly to those who admit them is hardly new, but continues to require examination of economic issues over time and circumstance in both the United States and Europe.

  Basic Economic Drivers of Immigration

  During its long history of immigration, the United States has experienced all of the forces defined in classic “push-pull” theories of population movement. In the “push” category are circumstances that have driven mostly desperate people to leave their homelands for uncertain futures. Famines in Europe motivated millions in the mid-nineteenth century; insufficient arable land forced farmers to choose between working in overcrowded cities and hoping to find unclaimed land in the United States. Aiding in the decision to leave was the reality that workers would outnumber jobs in Europe, creating a surplus of labor with no safety net. In the first half of the twentieth century, fascist regimes and two devastating wars created surges of dislocated Europeans who would seek resettlement in any safe environment. Well-educated young people in Asia and Africa facing bleak job prospects moved to pursue opportunities abroad, particularly in the United States, and the specter of poverty and violence drove many to attempt long and dangerous journeys for a chance at a better life. Economically or socially disrupted lives defined literally millions of immigrants.

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  Eastern European Immigrant Families

  • Mihaela Robila(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Historical Background of Eastern European Immigration in the United States

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203869918-2

  This chapter includes an overview of the historic immigration from Eastern Europe. Historic policies with a focus on their impact on Eastern European immigration are discussed since the immigration process is determined largely by the laws of the sending and receiving countries. These policies regulate the characteristics of the immigrant cohorts, indicating how many people are allowed to immigrate, their nationalities, and their human capital (education levels and occupations). The characteristics of Eastern European immigrants such as numbers, types of occupations, origins, and settlement issues are included.

  Immigration from Eastern Europe can be generally organized around four historic major waves: the first wave refers to the late 1800s to 1921, the second from 1921 to 1945, the third from 1945 to 1989, and the fourth after 1990. Following is a comprehensive analysis of each of these waves with a focus on the patterns of immigration, with specific numbers, origins, occupations, and settlement issues for each wave.

  The Earliest Eastern European Immigration Wave: Late 1880S to 1920S

  Until the later 1800s, immigrants entered freely into the United States. Before the American Civil War, most immigrants arrived in the United States from Great Britain, Germany, and Ireland. By the 1880s, the origin of European immigrants began to change—many of the new immigrants arriving in the United States came from Eastern European countries, like Poland, Hungary, and Latvia, rather than from Western European countries, peaking with several years of over one million per year in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Several immigration acts in 1875, 1903, and 1917 limited the number of immigrants on a variety of moral, economic, and physical grounds. Immigration lessened during World War I but increased again after the war (Edmonston, & Passel, 1994). Earlier flows of Eastern European immigrants consisted of a majority of manual workers—labor migrants in search of menial, agricultural, and generally low-paid jobs. They settled along the Northern and Mid-Atlantic regions, mainly due to the proximity of their homelands, which would make their trip from home and return(s) less expensive (Robila, 2008

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  American Civilization

  An Introduction

  • David Mauk, Alf Tomas Tønnessen, John Oakland(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 The people

  Settlement and immigration

  • Mother of exiles
  • Early encounters between Europeans and Native Americans
  • The founders
  • The first wave: colonial immigration, 1680–1776
  • The second wave: the “old” immigrants, 1820–90
  • Settlement patterns and nativism
  • The third wave: the “new” immigrants, 1890–1930
  • A renewed immigration debate and immigration restriction
  • Wartime policies and the search for principle in immigration policy
  • The fourth wave: 1965 to the present
  • Attitudes to immigrants: the contemporary debate
  • Exercises
  • Further reading
  • Websites

  Mother of exiles

  Immigration is a central aspect of US history. It is a major reason that the nation’s total population grew to more than 325 million by 2016. Believing in the American dream, many tens of millions of people have come to live in the US. They thus changed their homelands, America and their family histories forever. They strengthened the nation’s commitment to “the dream” and to its ideal of being a refuge for the poor and oppressed, a nation of nations. Gradually, over the centuries of massive immigration and the struggles of newcomers and Americans to adjust to each other, the view that the nature of the nation was and should be a composite of many national backgrounds, races and cultures gained popular acceptance.

  This pluralistic view continues to face opposition. In 2016, Donald Trump made his promise to build a Great Southern Wall against immigrants a major part of his presidential campaign. Resistance to pluralism comes from several quarters: from those opposed to the presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, those who believe the country is becoming “Latinized” and that newcomers should leave their homeland cultures behind, from people who feel that newcomers take “our” jobs, and those convinced that the latest wave of immigration necessitates a focus on cohesion.

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  The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture

  • Christopher Bigsby(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  If these are myths when applied to the generality of immigrants, what are the realities? The motives that impel an individual to leave one way of life and exchange it for another are often complex, but, by and large, economic motives – the desire to improve one’s position in life, to provide a better life for one’s children – are the major causal factors. Table 4.1. Foreign-born in the United States, 1850–2000 Year Number (in millions) Percentage 1850 2.2 9.7% 1860 4.1 13.2% 1870 5.6 14.0% 1880 6.7 13.3% 1890 9.2 14.7% 1900 10.4 13.6% 1910 13.6 14.7% 1920 14.0 13.2% 1930 14.3 11.6% 1940 11.7 8.9% 1950 10.4 6.9% 1960 9.7 5.4% 1970 9.6 4.7% 1980 14.1 6.2% 1990 19.8 7.9% 2000 21.1 11.1% Source: US Census data. A most useful analysis is in Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon. “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States:1850–1990,” Population Division Working Paper No. 15, Washington: US Bureau of the Census, February, 1999. roger daniels 74 From the beginning the vast majority of immigrants came – or were brought – to America to work. It follows, then, that immigrants were, disproportionably, of working age. Most were between their late teens and late thirties, and relatively few were either children or over forty. Given the nature of paid employment before the most recent decades, immigrants were predominantly male. Since 1950, for a variety of reasons there has been a slight female majority among legal immigrants to America. The evolution of american immigration policy to 1917 For the first centuries of American history there was a vast continent to fill up, so the more the merrier. Interruptions of immigrant flows resulted chiefly from wars and unenforceable policies of European powers to halt or minimize emigration.

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  Undocumented Workers' Transitions

  Legal Status, Migration, and Work in Europe

  • Sonia McKay, Eugenia Markova, Anna Paraskevopoulou(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The importance of the nation state in determining who is part of it and who is not, as the above quote suggests, is highly relevant to any study of migration. However, migration is not a new phenomenon of social life nor was it one that was the subject of significant state controls and regulations before the start of the 20th century. This point is of specific relevance to the undocumented migration of today, as it is not only part of an overall migratory movement but, we would assert, is the direct result of such controls and regulations. For us, therefore, it has been important to begin by focusing on the key reasons for such a change. How did migration policies move from being very limited in their scope, to the restrictions that we see today? Could the aims of states to limit entry for very specific groups of workers, be seen as solely serving the short-term interests of the labour market? The chapter therefore discusses the main types of migratory movements occurring in the 20th and early 21st centuries, although to place this in its context we also provide a brief overview of migration throughout European history. We have concentrated mainly on European developments, but within the wider context of international migration. We demonstrate that although European policy today is based on keeping people out, for most of their own history Europeans were themselves migrants. As the subject of migration covers many and complicated aspects, we have focused on what we see as the most significant developments that help us in understanding the concept of undocumented migration today.

  The chapter specifically focuses on irregular migration from a perspective that views undocumented status as a socially constructed notion, put in place by states to control the number and typologies of entry. And as we shall see in Chapter 5 , today there are concentrated efforts by governments to regulate migration at a time that when the irregular movement of people is also high (Castles and Miller, 2009). This poses further difficulties, as whereas the literature on the history of migration is rich, there are limited resources that provide a robust historical background on irregular migration.

  Within these limitations and as we shall see later in this chapter, European history of migration consists of two major trends: emigration towards most parts of the world mainly through various forms of colonisation and immigration consisting of inter-European movements of population, as well as migration from outside Europe. Both of these trends have contributed to the policies and general developments of European migration since 1945 and can be distinguished into two broad periods. First are the post-war mass labour migrations of the 1950s to the mid 1970s. These are represented both in migrations within Europe—for example, from Italy to Germany and from the developing world mainly towards Western Europe but also to America, Australia, and New Zealand. This period came to an end with the oil crisis in the mid 1970s. The second period starts from the mid 1970s. This represented a new economic phase globally and in Europe. It has also been a period of rapid political change, especially in Central and Eastern Europe after the 1990s. As a consequence, relatively new migratory patterns have risen, to include the migration (mainly labour focused but not exclusively so) of Central and East Europeans to other European countries, primarily to the EU15 countries of Western and Southern Europe.1

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  U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century

  Making Americans, Remaking America

  • Louis DeSipio, Rodolfo O. De La Garza(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  During the first decade of the country’s history, this elite consensus supporting unfettered European immigration gave way to a period of anti-immigrant fervor that reached its peak with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). The origins of these concerns were domestic and international. Domestically, the party then in control—the Federalist Party—saw the immigrants as a potential source of support for their emerging opposition—the Jeffersonians, or Democratic Republicans. Internationally, the cause was the French Revolution and the political turbulence that it spurred throughout Europe. Political refugees from the European tumult arrived in the United States. Many in the United States feared that the ideas of these political refugees—on all sides of the ideological spectrum—would destabilize the new American republic. Not believing that it was within its jurisdiction to restrict immigration, Congress limited naturalization as a tool to reduce the desirability of immigration and to slow the political ascendance of immigrants in American politics. This concern about immigrants ended rapidly with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, which then led to the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1802.

  Although there are no exact numbers, voluntary immigration in the period between the end of the Revolution and 1820, when the United States first began to record information on migrants who arrived in the country by ship, slowed from prerevolutionary levels and probably did not exceed 2,000 people per year. In part, this decline resulted from British efforts to restrict emigration (which lasted until the 1820s). Also, the wars that raged through Europe in this period increased the difficulties of securing transport. The composition of the voluntary immigration in this era was not significantly changed from the prerevolutionary period. British and Scottish immigrants dominated the flow. Most of these British and Scottish immigrants settled in the cities of the Northeast and in newly settled territories in the Appalachian region and the upper Midwest. The first decade of the nineteenth century also saw the migration of the first non-white, non-slave population—Haitians fleeing their revolution.

  Like their prerevolutionary predecessors, these early nineteenth-century immigrants experienced considerable economic opportunity. Most immigrants in this era had the option of domestic migration westward. This geographic mobility—of both immigrants and US-born populations—reduced the potential for the formation of cohesive ethnic communities and also reduced the likelihood of anti-immigrant movements by the US-born in the cities and regions where the immigrants first settled.

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  Demographic Dynamics and Development

  • Yves Charbit(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-ISTE

    (Publisher)

  International labor migration was controlled by hostilities until 1919; post-war rebuilding took the energies of surviving workers; transatlantic migration was squelched when the United States dramatically narrowed immigration quotas in the 1920s; the international depression of the 1930s so reduced the demand for labor that some nations closed their borders to foreign workers. There were massive displacements at the end of each war, but the scale was fundamentally different from that of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the decade after World War II, a familiar migration scenario appeared. Men and women came to European cities to perform menial tasks that would allow them Dynamics of Migration History in Western Europe 165 to retain or upgrade their family landholdings. In some cases, newcomers sent for their wives or married a compatriot. They visited home and talked to others about making the trip. Circular migrations became the chain migration systems that are so important to history. Yet two important distinctions separate these migrants from the past. The newcomers crossed borders from countries of southern Europe, the Mediterranean basin (North Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey), sub-Saharan Africa and far-flung colonies of Europe. Also, the states of Western Europe took an active part, if not as recruiters then as agencies that attempted to control the volume and direction of migration. By 1981, over 11 million foreign nationals from southern Europe, North Africa and the British New Commonwealth lived in the United Kingdom and northwestern Europe (Rogers 1985). These international migrations occurred against a background of internal migrations that depleted the countryside, inflated urban populations and raised concerns about what came to be called the rural exodus or Landflucht.

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  Citizenship and Immigrant Incorporation

  Comparative Perspectives on North America and Western Europe

  • G. Yurdakul(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 Today, international migrations are intricately entangled in politics and ideology and are negotiated at the upper levels of the contemporary global system far above the heads of those personally interested. The involvement of political (denoting actual policies) and ideological (declared doctrines) interests in deciding the size, composition, and directions of population movements in the contemporary world creates considerable tensions and contradictions that have been the subject of public debate and a substantial literature in the field of international migration studies (see, e.g., Castles and Davidson, 2000; Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield, 1994; Aleinikoff, 2001; Joppke, 1998; Zolberg, 2000; Hollifield, 2000; Foner, 2000; Schneider, 2002). One common and two divergent general effects of turn-of-the-twentieth- century and contemporary globalization on immigrants’ subsequent eco- nomic adaptation in the receiver society should be noted. The first is the socioeconomic disadvantage of the majority of past and present immigrants from un(der)developed S/E parts of the world in the entry phase of their economic adaptation to the host, American society. The two divergent effects include, on the one hand, an additional, political, disadvantage for a large proportion of contemporary poor and low-skilled S/E immigrants who enter and make a living in America as “illegal” or undocumented resi- dents, and, on the other hand, an economic advantage for those originating from higher educational and occupational strata of their home countries. integration of past and present immigrants / 33 Host Society Structures: Effects of Economy, Immigration Policies, and Civic Culture The economic and civic-political conditions in the American society at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have affected immi- grants’ adaptation share some general similarities and differ on several important accounts.

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