Immigration. International migration, as an aspect of the process of globalization, has been taking place on a large scale since 1500. For the European powers, North America, as well as Asia, Africa, Australasia, and South America, became a site of competing imperial ambition and capitalist enterprise. Imperialism required the voluntary and involuntary migrations of labor to exploit resources, build markets, transportation networks, and other infrastructures, and operate agricultural, commercial, and industrial establishments. Human migration, however, has never been solely an economic phenomenon; persecution, genocide, war, and famine have also stimulated it. Similarly, the familiar dichotomy of slave and free migrations is too simple. In the coerced category, one can distinguish among slaves, exiles, deported convicts, and refugees, while the voluntary category includes colonists, labor migrants, sojourners, adventurers, and entrepreneurs. America has received all of these.
While the earliest migrations, some 30,000 years ago across the land bridge from Asia, brought the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (denoted “Indians” by Europeans), this essay focuses on the post‐1500 migrants who crossed national borders from adjacent as well as from transoceanic countries. The Spanish planted St. Augustine, Florida in 1565 and established early settlements in the
Southwest several decades before the English arrived at
Jamestown in 1606. French, Dutch, Swedish/Finnish, and Russian colonists were eventually incorporated into the British colonies (and then the United States) by means of territorial conquest or purchase. Meanwhile, of the 12 million Africans brought in chains to the New World, some 450,000 landed in the British mainland colonies (and then the United States).
Because of differing policies of proprietors and joint stock companies, natural resources, and land‐distribution systems, various British colonies attracted different mixes of immigrants. Organized migrations of co‐religionists established the
New England colonies, homogeneous communities with a strong Puritan character. By contrast, the Middle Colonies attracted a polyglot, religiously diverse population, sometimes including even Roman Catholics and Jews. Land‐hungry German Lutherans and pietists and Scots‐Irish Presbyterians flocked to Pennsylvania, settling the back country as far south as Georgia. Although religious motives impelled a minority, most colonists aspired to improve their material conditions. The southern colonies, growing staple crops such as tobacco and indigo, initially recruited British indentured servants or imported convicts, but by the eighteenth century, African slaves, first introduced in Virginia in 1619, had become the major source of labor. Colonial immigration thus determined longlasting regional racial, ethnic, and social patterns within the original states and beyond.
Far from being a homogeneous Anglo‐American population, colonial America was very diverse in culture, language, religion, and race. Of the 3.9 million persons enumerated in the first federal
census in 1790 (Indians were not counted), those of English stock comprised only 48 percent; 19 percent were of African ancestry; and another 12 percent were Scots and Scots‐Irish. Germans accounted for 10 percent, with smaller numbers of French, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and Swedes.
Reflecting this heterogeneity, The
Revolutionary War was in a sense, a civil war pitting certain groups against others, often along ethnic and religious lines. After the war, in the first of a number of
emigrations, some eighty thousand Loyalists left for Canada and Britain. Having achieved independence, the leaders of the new republic faced the task of nation‐building. Lacking deep roots in the soil and ancient ties of blood, they fashioned an American identity from Enlightenment doctrine of natural rights; one became an American by assent, not by descent. Such a conception of nationhood well suited a “nation of immigrants.” The
Constitution alluded to immigration only indirectly: it provided that slave importation would not be prohibited prior to 1808, and it gave Congress the power to regulate foreign commerce. The latter underlay the judicial doctrine granting the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Authorized by the Constitution to establish “an uniform rule of naturalization,” Congress in 1790 defined the criteria for naturalization as two years' residence (subsequently changed to five years); good character; an oath to support the Constitution, and the renunciation of all foreign allegiances. These liberal requirements enabled millions of immigrants to become American citizens. Equally important, the United States adopted the principle that place of birth, not blood, determined nationality, native‐born children of foreign parents were citizens by birthright. The 1790 law, however, also restricted naturalization to “free white person[s]” making the racial test of “whiteness” essential to American citizenship. In 1870, during
Reconstruction, Congress extended the privilege of naturalization to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” but in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly excluded Chinese immigrants from citizenship. Only the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 finally removed all racial bars to citizenship.
Between 1790 and 1820, as war interrupted transatlantic commerce, only 1 million immigrants arrived. Immigration grew slowly thereafter, surpassing a million in the decade of the 1840s as canal and railroad projects,
mining and
lumbering, urban construction, and western land settlement created an insatiable demand for labor. Meanwhile, a more than doubling of Europe's population in the nineteenth century and the disruption of traditional livelihoods by the industrial revolution displaced millions of peasants and artisans. Not a desire for change, but a need to escape radical social and economic transformations, impelled many immigrants. They hoped in America to conserve their customary ways of life. Meanwhile burgeoning transoceanic commerce, resulting in regular and improved shipping (steamships were introduced by the 1840s), facilitated the migration process. Immigration became an integral part of an Atlantic economy involving the exchange of capital, commodities, and labor.
From the 1840s on, recurring waves of immigration brought some sixty million persons to America. But the volume of immigration has varied, with peaks and valleys reflecting economic and political conditions in both the United States and the sending countries.
Business cycles, famines, persecutions, wars, and migration policies on both ends of the migration process affected the volume and direction of migrations. Mostly voluntary immigrants, the newcomers chose when to leave, how to travel, and where to go. Individual migrants were atypical; families and even communities usually made collective decisions and departed together. Once established, the immigrants called on relatives and friends to join them. Thus international networks linked specific villages in Europe with settlements in the United States. The lure of America was exerted not only by the advertising of shipping companies, land speculators, and state agencies, but even more by the “America letters” from those who had already come.
The history of American mass immigration falls into four periods. During the first (1840–1890) almost 15 million arrived (over 4 million Germans, 3 million Irish, another 3 million British, and a million Scandinavians). The second period (1891–1920) brought an additional 18‐plus million (almost 4 million from Italy, 3.6 million from Austria‐Hungary, and 3 million from Russia). In the third period (1920–1960), only 7.5 million immigrants (including many Mexicans) arrived—a decline reflecting restrictive U.S. immigration policies, economic
depressions, and wars hot and cold. The ongoing fourth period, which began in the 1960s accounted for approximately 20 million immigrants by 2000, of whom some 24 percent were from Mexico, another 24 percent from Central and South America and the Caribbean, and 35 percent from Asia. While almost 90 percent of immigrants of the first three periods originated in Europe, only 10 percent of the fourth period did.
1840–1890.
During this expansive period, the United States admitted all comers with few restrictions. British immigrants, English‐speaking and Protestant, were readily absorbed. While the Welsh, Scots, and Scots‐Irish immigrants initially organized their own settlements, societies, and churches, they gradually merged into a British‐American ethnicity, strengthening the emerging definition of the American as white, Anglo‐Saxon, and Protestant. Although some established agricultural and utopian colonies, British tradesmen and industrial workers tended to settle in the urban centers of the East. The British often occupied managerial and skilled labor positions in such emerging industries as
mining, steel making, and textiles. Experienced in trade unionism, they provided leadership for the emerging American labor movement.
While Irish Catholic emigration began well before and continued long after the famine years of the 1840s, it was the more than 1 million fugitives from the “Great Hunger” who established the negative stereotype of the Irish immigrant as pauperized and disease‐ridden. Few of the Irish chose to become farmers, preferring the cities and towns of the East and
Middle West. Some were craftsmen, but most held low‐paid, dirty, and often dangerous jobs, as railroad and construction laborers, miners, and factory hands. From the 1860s, females, often single young women, predominated among the Irish immigrants. Many worked as domestic servants, textile hands, and seamstresses, sending money back to their families or to bring relatives to America.
Like the British, the Irish figured prominently in establishing trade unions. They also brought modes of resistance that had been used against landlords: sabotage and assassination. In the 1870s, the “Molly Maguires” conducted a campaign of violence against the mining companies in Pennsylvania's anthracite region. The Irish quickly demonstrated talent for American politics; the saloon keeper became an important agent for mobilizing Irish voters. By 1900, many mayors of northern cities and the majority of their policemen and firemen were of Irish origin.
Irish immigration made
Roman Catholicism a major force in America. Among the Irish themselves, the Church exerted political as well as spiritual leadership. The parish became synonymous with the community, and the priest the acknowledged authority. Irish immigrants had suffered religious as well as economic persecution at the hands of the British, and Catholicism became inextricably intertwined with Irish‐American ethnicity.
Their Catholicism also subjected the Irish to fierce religious prejudice. The nativist movement that culminated in the
Know‐Nothing party of the 1850s sought to exclude the Irish from political life and even from the country. The Irish suffered verbal abuse in Protestant churches and the U.S. Congress, and physical violence on city streets.
Anti‐Catholicism remained a major theme of American nativism well into the twentieth century.
Objects of bigotry,
Irish Americans, ironically, became major antagonists of other racial groups. Competing with blacks for jobs, the Irish sought to achieve the privileges of “whiteness” by venting their hostility toward
African Americans. Irish workers also figured prominently in the anti‐Chinese movement in
California and displayed hostility toward later immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Nurturing memories of colonial oppression, Irish Americans reserved their deepest hatred for the British. Their support of Irish liberation movements extended from the 1850s to the 1990s. Irish‐American ethnic nationalism, symbolized by the celebration of St. Patrick's Day, fused Catholicism, nostalgia for the “auld sod,” and bitterness for injuries inflicted by Anglo‐Americans.
Ethnic Germans (often espousing provincial identities as Bavarians, Pomeranians, and so forth) constituted the largest group of European immigrants, totaling over 6 million. Unlike the Irish, religion was not as unifying a force for German immigrants, who included Roman Catholics, Protestants (Lutheran and Reformed), Jews, and Free Thinkers. German‐American ethnicity was thus largely “invented” in the United States, following the creation of the German empire in 1870. More than most immigrant groups, German immigrants came from various ranks of society, with merchants, professionals, artisans, skilled workers, and farmers well represented, along with a cultural elite of intellectuals and artists. Within “Little Germanies” in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee,
Chicago, and other cities, Germans established clubs, churches, schools, and beer gardens, as well as newspapers, symphony orchestras, choral societies, and literary circles. Unlike other immigrant groups, German immigrants were not intimidated by American culture; indeed, many viewed their culture and language as superior to that of the uncouth Americans. Their attitude, plus beer drinking and boisterous singing, particularly on Sundays, antagonized Anglo‐Americans. Conflicts over cultural issues such as Sabbatarianism,
temperance, and German‐language schools long plagued German‐Anglo relationships.
German immigrants were also denounced as dangerous radicals. Many “48ers” (veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Europe) and their Turnvereins (cultural and athletic clubs) did indeed profess radical republicanism and atheism. Some espoused Marxist
socialism and
anarchism. German immigrants established strong labor unions and socialist organizations modeled after those in Germany. The 1886
Haymarket affair in Chicago resulted in the supression of the German‐led anarchist movement and fixed in the minds of many Americans the image of the immigrant radical as a wild eyed bomb thrower. Recurring “Red Scares” based on such fears became yet another theme of American nativism.
Many German and Scandinavian immigrants shunned urban industrial areas for the rich and affordable farmlands of the Middle West. Arriving in family groups, often coming from the same localities, they settled large contiguous areas. Ethnic maps of rural America resembled patchwork quilts. While they adjusted to new crops, farming methods, agricultural markets, and environmental conditions, their relative isolation enabled them to maintain their cultures and languages over several generations. The church, whether Catholic or Lutheran, played a central role as community center as well as place of worship. But the lure of city lights attracted the youth, and urban migration gradually eroded the demographic base of these German and Scandinavian settlements.
Two other sources of immigration figured significantly in this first period: China and Canada. Although Chinese immigrants numbered only some 200,000, the reaction they elicited influenced U.S. immigration policy for a century. Initially drawn by the Gold Rush of 1849, Chinese workers in the
West provided an important labor supply for building the transcontinental railroad, mining, and
agriculture. Sojourners like many Europeans, these predominantly male immigrants came to make money and return home. The objects of vicious stereotypes depicting them as morally degenerate pagans, they were subjected to riots,
lynchings, and legal restrictions. Supported by many European immigrants and labor unions, the anti‐Chinese movement gained national dimensions, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Erecting a racial barrier to immigration, this precedent‐setting law was subsequently extended by law and judicial decisions to Asians generally.
Emigration from Canada, often slighted in accounts of U.S. immigration history, has been highly important, totaling over three million. Of these, some two‐thirds were Anglo‐Canadians who quickly blended into the larger American population. However, the other third, the French‐Canadians, had a distinctive history and influence. In the province of Quebec, a peasantry with large families and few resources increasingly migrated to the mill towns of New England. Because the
textile industry employed women and children, this was a family migration. Strong kinship ties, proximity to places of origin, and the French language made the Quebecois resistant to assimilation. The Catholic Church's structure of parishes, parochial schools, and benefit societies represented another powerful cohesive force. For this colonized group subject to Anglo‐Protestant domination, Catholicism became, as it did for Irish Catholics, a core element of Franco‐American ethnicity.
1891–1930.
These decades witnessed a level of immigration matched only by that of the late twentieth century. In several years, the annual total exceeded one million. In 1900, almost 14 percent of the U.S. population was foreign born; with their American‐born children, immigrant families acccounted for over a third of the total population. In the succeeding decades, the “foreign” element grew ever larger and more diverse. Before the 1890s, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe, thereafter, eastern and southern Europeans predominated: Italians, eastern European Jews, and Slavs. This shift reflected the movement eastward of European industrial and agricultural
capitalism. Finns, Slovaks, and Greeks now migrated for reasons similar to those that had earlier uprooted Norwegians, Irish, and Germans: modernization was undermining time‐honored forms of work and life. However, owing to improved transportation and differing aspirations, the post‐1890s immigrants were much more likely than their predecessors to be temporary sojourners. Like the Chinese, they wanted to earn dollars and return home to buy land. For this reason, the southern and eastern European immigration was overwhelming male (the Finns were an exception). If they decided to remain, as many did, they sent for wives, brides, and children. The rate of return varied by nationality, but was often over 50 percent. Many immigrants made multiple trips back and forth across the Atlantic. The exceptions were Jews and Armenians fleeing religious and ethnic persecution.
This vast immigration also reflected the labor demands of an expansive, if volatile, American economy.
Industrialization and
urbanization required workers, skilled and unskilled. Few of the post‐1890s immigrants became farmers; they sought out the cities, factory towns, and mining and lumber camps offering immediate wages. With few exceptions, these immigrants bypassed the still largely agrarian
South. Southern and eastern European immigrants for the most part entered the labor force as common laborers. Not only did employers consider them less desirable, but the Germans, Irish, and British who had preceded them (as well as old‐stock Americans) resisted their entry into the skilled trades and trade unions. Though partly motivated by fear of labor competition, such discrimination also expressed prejudice against southern and eastern European “races” who were not truly “white men” but “black labor.”
Although denounced as strikebreakers and wage cutters (which on occasion they were), the southern and eastern Europeans generally proved amenable to labor organization. Many in fact had been involved in socialist and anarchist movements, and participated in strikes and protests, in their home countries. When admitted into unions such as the United Mine Workers or the United Packinghouse Workers, Slavs, Lithuanians, and Hungarians demonstrated strong solidarity. Jews and Italians, excluded from craft unions, formed industrial unions in the clothing and textile industries. Eastern and southern European immigrants were in the forefront of early‐twentieth‐century labor struggles, and they and their children formed the backbone of what became the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s.
Some East European Jews and Italians dispersed throughout the country; the former often as peddlers and merchants; the latter as miners and in agriculture. Most, however, initially concentrated in Manhattan, Jews on the Lower East Side, the Italians in East Harlem. Migrants from the shtetls of Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, and the paesi of Sicily, Calabria, and Campania, they clustered in tenements with their townspeople. Orthodox Jews eager to observe their religion formed shuls and landsmanshaften and patronized kosher butchers and grocers. A large and important segment, however, was secular and socialist. Active in politics and labor activities, they sponsored bunds, theaters, newspapers, and discussions clubs. Many men and women were tailors and seamstresses, peddlers and small shopkeepers. Entreprenurial and thirsty for education, the second generation tended to move into business or the professions. These Yiddish‐speaking Jews had a difficult relationship with the more established German Jews who feared a growth of
anti‐Semitism because of the newcomers' exotic appearance and behavior. Religious, cultural, and political differences, including Zionism, divided Jewish immigrants, old and new, into numerous conflicting camps.
Internal divisions based on regional and local origins plagued the Italians even more. Membership in mutual benefit societies was often limited to those from the same paese. Among the Italians, family loyalties were so intense and exclusive that they created few other institutions. Although nominally Roman Catholics, even their religious piety focused upon the local patron saint whose annual festa was the year's high point. Their alleged religious “indifference” attracted Protestant proselitizers and the disdain of ardent Irish Catholics. Like the Jews, many Italians were radicals (particularly syndicalists and anarchists) and free thinkers. They were militant, active in the
Industrial Workers of the World, and some anarchists resorted to violence. Most Italian immigrants remained unmoved by Italian nationalism. However, patriotic passions aroused by
World War I evolved into a filio‐fascism that, despite the opposition of an anti‐fascist minority, dominated Italian‐American communities into the 1930s.
Beginning as unskilled laborers on the
railroads and in mines and factories, few Italian Americans rose to the level of skilled workers. Exceptions were those with trades such as stone cutters, tailors, and barbers. Others engaged in petty commerce, providing goods and services in the Little Italies. The children normally left school at an early age. The second generation remained largely proletarian, although many moved into the ranks of skilled blue‐collar workers. For Italian Americans, the breakthrough into the middle class was largely a post‐World War II phenomenon.
Among the millions of Slavic immigrants from the German, Russian, and Austro‐Hungarian empires, Poles were the most numerous. Largely unschooled peasants, they, too, entered the ranks of unskilled labor. Poles, however, valued by employers for their brawn and reliability, were largely employed in heavy industry: coal mining, meat packing, steel making, and automobile manufacturing. Unlike the Italian and Jewish women who worked in sweatshops and tenements, Polish women more often were employed as domestics and factory hands. Densely populated “Poletowns,” dotting the industrial heartland from Cleveland to Chicago and south to Pittsburgh, provided an environment in which Polishness prevailed. Dominated by Germans or Russians since Poland's partition in the eighteenth century, Polish immigrants shared the Irish sense of being a colonial people and similarly found a source of identity and resistance in the Catholic Church. Community and parish were congruent, and within both the priest was the accepted leader.
The immigrants' Polish and Catholic identities sometimes clashed, however, resulting, for example, in the formation of rival fraternal organizations, one nationalist, the other religious. Opposition to control by an Irish‐American Catholic hierarchy gave rise to bitter conflicts and even a schismatic Polish National Catholic Church. World War I catalyzed Polish‐American nationalism, and contributed greatly to Poland's reunification.
The tide of new immigrants evoked anxieties among Anglo‐Americans and calls for greater immigration restriction. To the fears of Roman Catholicism and immigrant radicalism was now added the menace of biological pollution. In the late nineteenth century, “scientific” racialism based on
eugenics and an assumed hierarchy of races (Nordics being the superior race) became a major tenet of Anglo‐American nationalism, justifying imperialism abroad and immigration restriction at home. The influx of southern and eastern Europeans of supposedly inferior racial stock triggered a nativist campaign against “undesirable and dangerous immigrants.”
Already in 1882, along with entrance requirements (the Chinese Exclusion Act), a second law had established health and moral standards for admission. In 1890, New York's
Ellis Island became a federal immigrant‐receiving station to screen immigrants arriving in steerage. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894, and the
American Federation of Labor called for even stricter immigration laws.
World War I intensified the anti‐immigrant climate, with demands for “One Hundred Percent Americanism” and attacks upon “hyphenated Americans.” While this patriotic hysteria focused on
German‐Americans, all foreigners became suspect. Linguistic and other aspects of ethnicity were suppressed or monitored by authorities and vigilante organizations. In this atmosphere, the nativist agenda prevailed. Wartime laws against “seditious” organizations, publications, and expressions were aimed particularly at immigrant radicals who opposed the war. Domestic labor strife and Bolshevism abroad further fueled the 1919–1920 “Red Scare” leading to the imprisonment of thousands of immigrants and the deportation of hundreds. The eugenic argument loomed especially large in public discussions and congressional debates. The immigration law of 1921 and the 1924 National Origins Acts allocated quotas according to the criteria of allegedly superior and inferior “races,” favoring “Nordics” over “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans” and totally excluding Asians. These statutes sought to protect the genetic character of the American people from foreign contamination.
The debate over immigration involved no less than the issue of what America was to become. Americans differed on the issue. Countering the xenophobia of the restrictionists, proponents of a liberal immigration policy cited Christian and democratic ideals of universal brotherhood and quoted Emma Lazarus's 1883 sonnet
The New Colossus, enshrined on the
Statue of Liberty, portraying the United States as an asylum for the oppressed. During much of the nineteenth century, Americans had generally believed that by some alchemy immigrants would be melded into a common national identity. Israel Zangwill's play
The Melting Pot (1909) provided the metaphor for this assimilationist ideology. However, the war and its aftermath caused many to question whether the world's “wretched refuse” could be transformed into worthy citizens. Others, including Horace Kallen and Randolph
Bourne, had an antithetical vision, espousing what was called
cultural pluralism. However, during the 1920s hardline Americanizers held the upper hand, and coercive Americanization programs demanded total Anglo conformity.
1930–1960.
During these three decades, only 7.5 million immigrants arrived, most after 1945. World War I, by interrupting transatlantic migration and creating an urgent demand for labor, had stimulated two alternative intracontinental migrations:
African Americans from the rural south to the industrial north, and Mexicans from south of the border. (The National Origins Act did not apply to the Western Hemisphere.) Mexicans had long found employment in the agricultural fields and mines of the Southwest, but they now moved further afield, to work on the railroads and in the packing houses of the Midwest, establishing barrios in cities along the paths of migration. With the onset of the Depression of the 1930s, however, the government instituted a program of forced repatriation, sending hundreds of thousands, including native‐born citizens, “home” to Mexico. Mexico continued to supply a “reserve army of labor” for American industry and agriculture, however. Federal agencies encouraged Mexican workers with the
World War II bracero program, and then reinstituted mass deportations in the 1950s.
The Depression ended a century of increasing, if fluctuating, immigration. In some years during the 1930s, thanks to both widespread unemployment and strict enforcement of the quota system, more persons left than entered the country. Even Jewish and other refugees desperately seeking asylum from fascist regimes were denied admission, partly due to a virulent anti‐Semitism.
The thirties brought both heightened ethnic and racial conflict, as organized hate groups mimicked Europe's fascists, but also a blooming cultural democracy. In literature, the arts and popular culture, celebrated American diversity. In
The Native's Return (1934) and other writings, the Austrian immigrant Louis Adamic popularized the idea that immigrants were as fully American as those whose ancestors had arrived at Plymouth Rock.
The outbreak of World War II further limited traditional sources of immigration and led to a campaign of national unity under the slogan “Americans All.” Immigrants and their descendants with few exceptions supported the war effort through military service and work in defense industries. Compared to World War I, this war saw less persecution of suspected “enemy aliens” with one major exception: the confinement of some 112,000 Japanese Americans, including the American‐born, in concentration camps, a policy clearly based on racial prejudice.
With the end of World War II came the
Cold War and an upsurge of
anti‐communism that would influence American immigration policy for half a century. Some post‐1945 efforts were made to resettle millions of European refugees, but Congress belatedly admitted only a modest number of these displaced persons. It became a principle of America's Cold War immigration policy to admit persons fleeing communist regimes, while excluding those escaping from sometimes brutal right wing dictatorships. Thus Hungarians, Czechs, Cubans after Fidel Castro's rise to power, and Jews from the Soviet Union received preferential treatment. Cold War immigration policy also concentrated on deporting, denying visas to, or seizing the passports of persons who allegedly had “subversive” ideas or associations. Paul
Robeson, W.E.B.
Du Bois, Charlie
Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, and many others fell afoul of these policies. The Immigration and Naturalization (McCarren‐Walter) Act of 1952 embodied this anti‐communist bias. While eliminating the racialist constraints on immigration and naturalization, the law perpetuated the national origins system. It also included special provisions for screening out “subversives” and deporting immigrants—even those who became U.S. citizens—who belonged to suspected communist organizations.
1960–2000.
The 1960s brought many changes in American society, including rejection of the “melting pot” ideal and the affirmation of particularistic identities, initially by African Americans, then by other racial and ethnic groups. This process of ethnicization, a revolt against Anglo‐American conformity and dominance, affirmed the survival, despite assimilationist pressures, of cultural memories, forms, and communities stemming from the great migrations of the past. Native Americans, Chicanos,
Asian Americans, and European descent groups (labeled “white ethnics”), celebrated their distinctive heritages and mobilized politically. Such manifestations of ethnicity among second and third generation European Americans, thought to have been thoroughly assimilated, surprised scholars and policy‐makers.
After the 1970s, the ideology of “multiculturalism,” celebrating racial and ethnic differences, proved profoundly influential, but also encountered vigorous opposition from political and religious champions of “traditional values.” The resulting “culture wars” were exacerbated by an explosive growth in immigration in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965, which radically altered the rules for entry. This law eliminated the national‐origins quota system and instead established preferences favoring relatives of U.S. citizens or of resident aliens, persons with particular skills and talents, and refugees from communist countries or the Middle East. The law's annual caps on immigration were soon exceeded because of the principle of family reunification and special provisions for refugees. While legal immigration surged, exceeding 800,000 a year by the 1990s, an estimated several hundred thousand undocumented immigrants filtered through the country's porous borders annually. Not since early in the century had immigrants arrived in such numbers, totaling as many as twenty million from 1970 to 2000. Responding to growing concerns, Congress passed measures designed to curb illegal immigration, but did not alter the generous immigration policy established in 1965.
By opening America's gates to the world, the 1965 act reversed the historical pattern of a predominantly European immigration. The great majority of post‐1965 immigrants—more than 80 per cent of the total—arrived from Asia and Latin America, with Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans among the largest contingents. Increasing numbers also arrived from Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa.
The post‐1965 immigration shook the American kaleidoscope, producing a dramatic reconfiguration of ethnicities. The range of skin hues expanded (some called it “browning of America”); the country's linguistic, musical, and culinary repertoire grew; and new forms of worship enriched the religious spectrum. The umbrella labels “Hispanic” and “Asian” marked an extraordinary diversity; Spanish‐speaking immigrants included several million each of Puerto Ricans (who are U.S. citizens), Mexicans, and Caribbean islanders, while Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians) immigrant groups each totalled a million or more. A less noted influx brought several million Arabic, Persian and African speakers from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, and Ethiopia. With perhaps 3 million Muslims, and 500,000 each of Buddhists and Hindus, the familiar “Protestant‐Catholic‐Jewish” triad no longer adequately described the American religious scene.
While in certain respects these newest immigrants resembled those of past eras, they also displayed striking differences. Rather than being concentrated in the bottom economic strata, the foreign‐born were now conspicuously present at all levels. Many, with education and technical, professional, or business skills, integrated smoothly into upper‐ and middle‐class American life residing in ethnically diverse suburbs.
But immigrants of rural or working‐class backgrounds experienced greater adjustment difficulties and sought security among their own kind. At the bottom of the ethnic‐class hierarchy, they competed with disadvantaged native‐born Americans for jobs, housing, and
welfare benefits. In fact, the availability of cheap Asian and Hispanic labor resulted in a revival of sweatshops in manufacturing. Since the economy no longer needed armies of workers to build railroads, mine coal, and tend machines, they often found traditional entry‐level jobs unavailable. In many respects, their experience mirrored that of the Europeans who had preceded them. Families and clans settled in particular locations, creating new ethnic neighborhoods with specialty food shops, churches, temples, mosques, cultural centers, and publications. Constructing new ethnic identities, they created self‐help and political organizations. And, as before, ethnic animosities and generational conflicts made the process of adjustment painful and tortuous.
While the cumulative impact of some 20 million post‐1965 immigrants had profound implications for the nation's future, grim forebodings about an “unprecedented immigrant invasion” seemed exaggerated. The
rate of immigration (the number of immigrants as a percentage of the total population) which was 10 per thousand in the 1900s, registered only 3.5 per thousand in the 1980s. While the number of foreign born reached an all‐time high by 2000, they accounted for only 10 percent of the population, as compared with 14.7 percent in 1910. In short, the statistical impact of late‐twentieth‐century immigration was much smaller than that of the past.
Still, fears aroused by the newcomers—their color, languages, and cultures, as well as their numbers—spawned a neo‐nativist reaction. While eschewing explicit racialism, advocates of immigration restriction expressed anxiety that the immigrants posed a threat to the homogeneity of the United States. Projecting immigration and birth rates forward, some demographers predicted that “minorities” (persons of American Indian, African, Asian, and Hispanic ancestry) would make up more than half of the American population by 2050 and that the United States would cease to be a predominantly white society.
The 1990 U.S. Census underscored the reality of ethnic diversity in America of the nineties. The 90 percent who responded to a question about ancestry or ethnic origin were classified into 215 ancestry groups. The largest was German, followed by Irish, English, and Afro‐American; next came Italian, Mexican, French, Polish, American Indian, Dutch, and Scotch‐Irish; another 21 groups accounted for over a million each, and even many smaller groups had sizeable representations: Maltese, Basque, Rom, Windish, Paraguayan, Belizian, Guyanese, Yemini, Khmer, and Micronesian, among others. Like glacial terminal moraines, these population groups represented deposits resulting from four centuries of immigration.
Bilingualism became a lightning rod for nativist anxieties in the 1990s. Some deplored school bilingual programs and the use of foreign languages in official documents as a threat to the nation's cultural and political integrity and lobbied for a constitutional amendment making English America's official language. Innocent of the country's linguistic history, proponents of this reform asserted that earlier immigrants had speedily and gladly Anglicized, and that new immigrants must do likewise. Proponents of bilingualism responded that coerced linguistic conformity violated the rights of non‐English speakers and was in any case unnecessary, given the overwhelming dominance of English. The struggle over language, symptomatic of broader ideological and political conflict, seemed sure to continue.
Despite the neo‐nativism, the newcomers generally received a more cordial welcome than had Japanese or Greeks at the turn of the century. In contrast to earlier eras' laissez‐faire attitude, public programs and voluntary agencies provided assistance and social services to newcomers. Further, federal policies and
Supreme Court decisions regarding bilingualism, voting rights, and
affirmative action legitimized ethnic pluralism. Multiculturalism, a loosely defined movement to make American culture and institutions fully representative of the country's increasing diversity, influenced popular consciousness. While
racism and xenophobia persisted, Americans in 2000 appeared more accepting and even appreciative of racial and ethnic differences. What would happen if massive immigration continued (particularly, if the booming economy of the 1990s turned bad) or if fears of biological or ideological contamination revived, remained to be seen.
See also
Agriculture;
Americanization Movement;
Anti‐Catholic Movement;
Canals and Waterways;
Erie Canal;
Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European;
Hispanic Americans;
Immigrant Labor;
Immigration Law;
Indentured Servitude;
Italian Americans;
Judaism;
Labor Markets;
Labor Movements;
Language, American;
Lutheranism;
Migrant Agricultural Workers;
Polish Americans;
Poverty;
Protestanism;
Puerto Rico;
Scandinavian Americans;
Slavery;
Social Class;
Race and Ethnicity;
Race, Concept of;
Urbanization.
Bibliography
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David Reimers , Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 1985.
Gary R. Mormino and and George Pozzetta , The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985, 1987.
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Roger Daniels , Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 1991.
Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds., A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930, 1991.
Kathleen Neils Conzen,, David Gerber,, Ewa Morawska,, George E. Pozzetta,, and and Rudolph J. Vecoli , The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the USA, and comments by Herbert J. Gans and Lawrence Fuchs, Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–63.
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Rudolph J. Vecoli
