Immigrants Come to America

When? And Who? Before 1880 most immigrants came from NW Europe –Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia –Were mostly Protestant After 1880 a greater proportion came from Eastern or Southern Europe –Italians, Turks, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, and Romanians, Russians, Poles –Mostly Roman Catholic and Jewish

How? Most crossed the Atlantic by the shortest and cheapest routes. –Immigrants bought tickets on steam ships underneath the deck and near the engine and rudder. Seasickness or disease often made the voyage miserable, and some passengers lost their lives. People from very different walks of lives were thrown together under strange conditions.

"Many immigrants had brought on board balls of yarn, leaving one end of the line with someone on land. As the ship slowly cleared the dock, the balls unwound amid the farewell shouts of women, and the fluttering of the handkerchiefs, and the infants held high. After the yarn ran out, the long strips remained airborne, sustained by the wind, long after those on land and those at sea had lost sight of each other.”

“ Everybody was sick. I don't even want to remember anything about that old boat. One night I prayed to God that it would go down because the waves were washing over it. I was that sick, I didn't care if it went down or not. And everybody else was the same way." -Bertha Devlin, an Irish immigrant in 1923

"I remember my grandfather always telling me how he knew he could be rich in America because he saw riches in the architecture of Ellis Island. He felt that if they let the poor in such a gorgeous hall then life in this country was just." -Rosanne Welch, granddaughter of Giuseppe Italiano, and Italian immigrant in 1904 Ellis Island's Front Gate

When They Arrived… Employers eagerly hired immigrants Immigrants were usually willing to work for cheaper wages than other Americans Immigrants who complained risked loosing their jobs, because there were always newcomers waiting to be hired.

Irish Immigrants In the 1840s a potato famine spread across Ireland and the rest of Europe. –1/8th of Ireland’s population starved to death or died from diseases caused by malnutrition. The Irish played important roles in the construction of America’s canal and railroad system

Chinese Immigrants Because American ships were involved in Chinese trade, news of the discovery of gold in California soon reached China China was overpopulated and faced famine. The Chinese were attracted to the opportunities of America The Chinese mined for gold and a large population of Chinese immigrants were hired to build western sections of the transcontinental railroad

Chinese Immigrants Americans were hostile towards the Chinese because they felt they were getting the jobs that whites deserved. They soon influenced politicians to pass the Exclusion Act of 1882: –Which cut off all legal Chinese immigration except for a few hundred per year.

Northern European Immigrants Germans: political unrest and revolutions caused Germans to immigrate to America. They mostly settled in farming areas. Scandinavians: Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns settled in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas