Where Did They Arrive?
Migration Waves Project Documents
THE FIRST WAVE: 1607-1830 (FOR MAP #1)
Total Immigrants: approximately 1.2 million
From the first Colonial settlements in Jamestown and Plymouth, America grew quickly from an estimated population of 250,000 in 1700 to an estimated 2.5 million in 1775, when the Revolution began, to a population of 9.6 million in the 1820 census.
WHO CAME? The early immigrants were primarily Protestants from northwestern Europe, as can be seen from the ethnic breakdown of the U.S. population in the first census of 1790. English 49%, African 19%. The English were by far the largest group of people to immigrate to the “New World”, with They began
WHERE DID THEY ARRIVE?
Generally, immigrants arrived at ports up and down the east coast of the the country. The symbolic port of entry was Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.
WHAT WERE THE REASONS FOR IMMIGRATION?
Economic Opportunity: Europe offered little opportunity for most people to advance economically during this period of aristocratic control of wealth and power. Thus, many people came to America seeking a chance to better their fortunes. The largest single group in the early years were indentured servants, poor people, debtors, and petty criminals who could not pay for their passage but entered into a contract to work for a master for 4-7 years in return for passage. Indentured servants were half the workforce until 1750 but declined afterwards as economic conditions improved in England.
Slavery: As indentured servants completed their contracts, Southern plantation owners increasingly replaced them with African slaves brought over in the Atlantic Slave. Although Africans were in Virginia as early as 1619, it was in the 18th Century that the slave trade grew exponentially. An estimated 800,000 Africans were brought over to America as slaves by 1808; nearly all of those had arrived before 1780. One in five Americans were slaves at the time of the first census in 1790.
Political Freedom: Immigrants such as Thomas Paine wanted to come here because Americans had far more rights than the average European of this period, who still lived under the control of kings and aristocrats. Occasional bloody revolts such as the English Civil War of the 1640s, the French Revolution of the 1790s, and other wars such as the 30 Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars, caused other refugees to flee to America.
Religious Freedom: During this period, most European governments had official state churches. Persecution of dissenters led some to come to America seeking freedom of worship, including the Puritans (“Pilgrims”), Friends (“Quakers”), Mennonites, French Huguenots, Spanish Jews, and English Catholics.
THE SECOND WAVE: 1830s-1880s (For Map #2)
Total Immigrants: 15.3 million.
As the population of the United States exploded from 13 million to 63 million between 1830 and 1890, a second wave of immigrants landed in America. The port of entry for the vast majority of these people was New York City. From 1855 on, arrivals were processed at Castle Garden, the first immigration center established by New York State.
Second-Wave immigrants were primarily Irish and German. Because they arrived in large numbers and differed from the existing Anglo-American society in religion and culture, they became the first immigrant groups to experience widespread hostility and organized opposition.
Reasons for Increased Immigration
Transportation Improvements: The development of clipper ships and railroads speeded travel and lowered the cost of the fare to America.
European Issues: War, famine, revolution, and industrialization drove many Western Europeans from their homelands in search of a chance for something better in America.
The “American Dream”: The growing reputation of the USA as a safe haven for immigrants and a land of opportunity for those willing to work hard drew people like a magnet. In 1886, the Statue of Liberty was erected on an island in New York harbor, seemingly as a welcome to each new boatload of arriving immigrants.
Where Second-Wave Immigrants Came From
Irish Catholicswere the single largest ethnic group in the Second Wave. With Ireland under British rule, they long been denied self-government and persecuted for their religion. But the main reason for Irish immigration was neither political nor religious, but economic. The Potato Famine of 1847 cut the population of Ireland in half by a combination of starvation and emigration. Most Irish immigrants to America settled in Eastern cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Irish men built the Erie Canal and railroads, while Irish women worked as domestic servants.
Germans were the second largest immigrant group in the Second Wave, left their homeland after the failure of the democratic revolutions of 1848 and in search of economic opportunity. They settled on farms and in the cities of the Midwest and Northeast. They came to dominate the American brewing industry.
Scandinavians from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark settled in the upper Midwest after the Civil War to work small farms.
Chinese: By the 1880s, over 100,000 Chinese immigrants had come to the West Coast of the United States due to poverty and war. Many worked on construction of the Transcontinental Railroads. Others were cooks, launderers, or miners.
THE THIRD WAVE: 1890s-1920s (Map #3)
Total Immigrants: 22.3 million
The population of the USA increased from 63 million in 1890 to 106 million in 1920, as immigration hit its peak. For three decades after 1890, an annual average of 580,000 immigrants arrived on American shores, and 1907 set a record of 1.3 million newcomers in a single year. On the eve of World War I, the foreign-born had swollen to 15% of the US population. With 75% of Third Wave immigrants coming through the Port of New York, the old state immigration center, Castle Garden, was overwhelmed. This led to the construction of the first federal immigration center, Ellis Island, which served as the main port of entry for American immigration from 1898 to 1924.
Where Third Wave Immigrants Came From
The character of immigration also changed with the Third Wave. By 1900, over 80% were from Southern and Eastern Europe (Italy, Russia, Austro-Hungary). Most southern and eastern European immigrants arriving via New York's Ellis Island found factory jobs in Northeastern and Midwestern cities.. The size and greater cultural diversity of the Third Wave would give rise to a great new Xenophobia (fear and hatred of foreigners) that would slam the door to new arrivals in the 1920 with the implementation of numerical quotas. WWI also slowed immigration to the United States.
REASONS FOR MIGRATION
High population growth in Southern and Eastern Europe.
Lack of jobs and food.
Scarcity of available farmland.
Mechanization of agriculture, which pushed peasants off the land.
Religious persecution of Russian Jews, who fled their villages after raids
Democracy.
Freedom of religion.
Available land.
Other forms of economic opportunity.
Booming industries like steel and railroads advertised for workers in Hungary and Poland. These new immigrants helped build new railroads and took jobs in steel mills.
Transportation improvements sped immigration:
By the late 19th century, regularly scheduled steamships replaced sailing ships, cutting what had been a 3-month voyage across the Atlantic to a mere 2 weeks.
Numerical quotas: Limits on the number of people that could enter the country.
THE FOURTH WAVE: 1965-Today (Map #4)
Total Immigrants: estimated 30+ million
US Population: 315 million+
The current wave of immigration is by far the largest in American history in absolute numbers: over 30 million legal immigrants have entered over the last four decades, supplemented by an illegal immigration of anywhere from 8 to 20 million. The new immigrants are primarily from Latin America and Asia.
The 1965 Immigration & Naturalization Act: How the Fourth Wave Began
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) on October 3, 1965, ending what Johnson called "a cruel and enduring wrong," the old racist National Origins quota system that favored immigrants from Northwestern Europe. The new law made family reunification (76%), individual talents and skills (20%), and refugee status (6%) the new criteria for admittance. Over the next four decades, the policies put into effect in 1965 would greatly change the demographic makeup of the American population, as immigrants entering the United States under the new legislation came increasingly from countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as opposed to Europe. It also raised the total number of immigrants allowed to about 300,000 per year, a number that has gradually been increased to the present one million per year.
In 1965, no one predicted the long-term effects of the new immigration law for its full impact would take some time to be felt. Legal immigration increased to 3.3 million in the 1960s, 4.5 million in the 1970s, 7.3 million in the 1980s, and 9 million in the 1990s. However, in the 2000s, it declined significantly to an estimated 5 million.
REASONS FOR INCREASED IMMIGRATION
Factors that drove Fourth Wave immigrants:
-Rising population pressures,
-the intense poverty of Third World countries
-government repression.
These forces combined with the pull of US economic opportunity and freedom to spur the Fourth Wave of immigration. At the same time that America began opening its doors to immigrants again the introduction of jet aircraft which could cross oceans in a few hours greatly decreased the cost and difficulty of travel: a far cry from the terrifying weeks spent on cramped boats by the early immigrants.
Port of Entry: Anywhere USA
Unlike past waves, there is no one central entry point for today's immigrants, who arrive at airports all over America in record numbers, or in other cases simply walk across the border
Where Fourth Wave Immigrants Come From
The Fourth Wave is the most diverse ever, with over 80% of immigrants coming from Latin America and Asia, bringing with them a veritable kaleidoscope of cultural traditions.Fourth Wave Immigrants have come to the US to escape Communist dictatorships (Cubans, Vietnamese, and Chinese) and civil wars (Salvadorans). Most have come in search of economic opportunity (Filipinos, Dominicans, and Indians). All these groups today have more than a million of their countrymen now living in the US, along with an estimated nearly 10 million Mexicans.