Immigration into the US

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Between the late 1870’s and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, American’s Industrial Revolution fueled the most rigorous period of immigration in American history. Many millions of people, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe came to America. Most were poor, didn’t speak English and almost all were strangers to America to society and culture. These were the “New Immigrants”, and they swelled to existing American cities, while also forming new cities in the process. The forces of immigration and urbanization would combine with industrialization to transform a once rural and agrarian nation into its modern form.
Before the time of industrialization, what is now called the United States, this nation was an agrarian society. Most of the people were Protestant, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxons from Northern and Western Europe. Many of them came to the United States because of political persecution, overpopulation, overused land, and shortage of jobs due to industrialization in Europe. Many of these “old immigrants” Thought that the United States would be a good place to escape these elements and start over. Industries were concentrated in the Northeast and railroads were the only “big business”. But once more and more “Big Businesses” began to pop-up, a larger workforce was needed. That is were the “New Immigrants” came into the picture.
Many of the “new immigrants” came to America for the same reasons as the “old immigrants- to escape religious and political persecution, and for a chance to start over again. Countries such as Italy, Ireland, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece, Romania, Croatia, and were represented in the immigration to the United States. These people came in the ten’s of millions. Before the Civil War, fifty percent of immigrants were from England, and the other forty percent were from Ireland. After the war and until 1890, almost ten million people, mainly from England, Wales, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, came to the United States. Finally, between 1890 and 1914, more than 15 million immigrants came to the United States ( “Immigration”). The Irish came to escape the “potato famine", and religious persecution. Russian Jews came to escape religious persecution also.
These immigrants were important to indu...

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...ican’s today treat these Mexican immigrants. Many people resent them because they do hard labor for cheap, and they are overpopulating our cities. They different from us, “Native Americans” in a lot of ways, from theirs clothes down to the foods they eat. Now that the “new immigrants” of the 19th century have become “old immigrants”, they have forgotten this is how their families in the United States got started. Just like the immigrants of the 19th century, these “new immigrants” will have a huge impact on the making the United States more diverse, and living up to the name of “The Land of Equal Opportunity”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. “Immigration”, http://www.historychannel.com/perl/print_book.pl?ID=35243
2. Archadeacon, T.J., 1983, Becoming American: An Ethnic History. The Free Press
3. Limmer, R and Dolkart, A., “The Tenements as History and Housing”., http://www.thirteen.org/tenement/eagle.html
4. Bodnar, J., 1985,. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban
America. Indiana University Press.

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