Transcript

America has always been known as a nation of immigrants. The United States has attracted more people from more nations than any other country in the world. Immigration has been an essential feature of the American experience from the inception of the American colonies.

The New Immigrants began to appear in significant numbers in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. They were “new” in the sense that they were coming from nations that heretofore had not been represented in the United States. Specifically, the nations of southern and eastern Europe: Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, etc. These were people that had never before been represented in the American mosaic, in the American population. And because many of them arrived not speaking English and many of them were adherents of religious faiths that were underrepresented in the United States, these New Immigrants appeared to many Americans to be aliens. Those Americans were very concerned about the ability of these new Americans, who began to arrive in the millions, to be absorbed into American culture, to be assimilated into American society, to embrace American values.

As a result of those concerns and the growing congestion in American cities created by this surge of new immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Americans began to form organizations explicitly to restrict these new immigrants from continuing to flow into the United States. Those efforts failed. And thank goodness they did, because ultimately those New Immigrants did indeed assimilate themselves into the United States and provided a continuing source of fresh energy and new ideas and a growing labor force for a rapidly growing American economy.

Immigration has been central to American development for a very good reason: it has provided most of the energy and much of the innovation that has made the United States a distinctive nation in the world.

Of course, opposition to immigration had been a force in American life long before the late 19th century. In fact, during the 1840s and 50s a so-called “Nativist” movement began to emerge in the United States opposed to the ongoing flood of immigrants coming from Germany and Ireland. In part, that was a religious-based Nativism. There was concern that these immigrants coming from Germany and Ireland were predominantly Catholic and that that was a threat to the Protestant faith in the United States. So the Nativist response to immigration was not new in the 19th century but the so-called New Immigration of the late 19th century was even more volatile and controversial than the earlier immigration, the Old Immigration in the first half of the 19th century because it involved people who were Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Catholic but also because these people were desperately poor and did not speak English.

And so there was great concern, especially in the late 19th century because of new theories of racial superiority, that the United States was not capable of assimilating and absorbing so many people of different races, different nations, and different cultures.

Study Plan

Follow this Study Plan as you work your way through the online materials. Check all that apply:

  1. Additional comments or issues to report:

Email Your Professor:

Your Name: 
Your Email Address: 
Your Professor's Email Address: