Immigration

The changing

face of America.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free,The wretched refuse

of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside

the golden door.”

There were many reasons for coming to America.

• People came to escape religious persecution, they came for political freedom, they came to find jobs, and they came so that they could own their own farms.

People came to America and settled in the cities of the Northeast

Ellis Island If you came from Europe, the main point of entry was through New York City

Most of the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island were poor. They crammed by the thousands aboard steamships that took weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Most spent all the money they had just to ride in third class — called steerage.

Immigrants entered the main building through its ground floor baggage room. They left their trunks, suitcases and baskets here until they were finished.

The first test the immigrants had to pass became known as the "six second medical exam." As the immigrants climbed the stairs to the Great Hall, doctors stood at the top and watched. They were looking for anyone having difficulty coming up the steps.

The main purpose of medical exams was to find persons with contagious diseases or conditions that would make them unable to work.

If their problem was curable, immigrants were sent to the island's hospital. If it was not, the steamship company that brought them would have to pay to send them back.

The Great Hall The Great Hall was the large waiting room of Ellis Island. Immigrants waited here for their interviews with legal inspectors after finishing their medical exams. At best, the entire process through Ellis Island took three to five hours.

But sometimes problems came up, like family members waiting for a relative to be treated in the hospital ward. Some families stayed for days on Ellis Island, others for weeks, and still others for months.

After passing the medical exams, immigrants had to prove they could legally come into America. Inspectors rejected any immigrant with a criminal record or those suspected of being indentured servants.

In the money exchange area immigrants exchanged the money of their homeland for dollars, and purchased any train tickets they needed. Laws passed in 1909 required each immigrant to have at least 20 dollars before they were allowed to enter America.

Just beyond the money exchange was the exit from Ellis Island. Staff members referred to this spot as the kissing post because of all the emotional reunions that were witnessed there.

Early immigrants were most often from Germany and Ireland

The potato famine had hit both countries and made emigration a way to survive.

Magazines in Germany write articles about the good life in

America

This one has an article called “Take Me Along”

German immigrants came with a dream

The Cartoon is about what a German immigrant thinks his life will be like in America and the harsh realities of real life on the farm

The Irish immigrants left a rural lifestyle in a nation lacking modern industry. Many immigrants found themselves unprepared for the industrialized, urban centers in the United States..

Though these immigrants were not the poorest people in Ireland (the poorest were unable to raise the required sum for steerage passage on a ship to America), by American standards, they were destitute.

They often had no money beyond the fare for their passage, and, thus, settled in the ports of their debarkation. In time, the sum total of Irish-Americans exceeded the entire population of Ireland. New York City boasted more Irishmen than Dublin, Ireland!

Later, immigrants from other parts of Europe, like the Italians came to

America"When they got to

America, they learned three things:- that the streets were not paved with gold;- that the streets were not paved at all;- and that they were expected to pave them."

Between 1880 and 1920, four million Italian immigrants crossed the Atlantic to the United States.

These Italians came in search of the "American Dream." They were seeking a life that they could never have within the borders of poverty stricken Italy.

Originally, almost all of the emigrants from southern Europe were men between the ages of eighteen and forty five.

They planned to remain in the U.S. for a year or two, and then return to Italy with money. By 1900, more and more of the immigrants were women and children.

Families came with the hope of settling down in the United States and creating a new life. The new immigrants usually settled into cities such as New York City and Chicago.

Scandinavians – came early 1900’s

Some Scandinavians formed collectively-owned businesses, or cooperatives. Cooperatives had been well known in many Scandinavian countries.

Finnish American Cooperative Bakery, Brooklyn, NY

Scandinavian America came to be dotted with cooperatively owned farms, dairies, and stores.

Writer and Danish immigrant Jacob Riis led a journalistic crusade to expose the horrific living conditions of America's urban slums, which included many new immigrants.

Riis' book How the Other Half Lives, a classic of muckraking literature, brought about a great wave of protest and led to major housing reform in the U.S.

Norway sent 1 million people between 1820 and 1920. Indeed, some estimates suggest that during the great immigrations of the 19th century Norway lost a higher proportion of its people to the U.S. than any country other than Ireland.

Eastern Europeans came to America

Russian Empire in 1890By the end of the 19th century, this vast country suffered from overpopulation, widespread famines and political unrest.

Many of the Empire’s peoples joined the great worldwide migration of the last decades of the century. Soon the Empire would be overthrown in a socialist revolution, then torn apart by years of war.

Three groups to join the exodus were the Russians, the Poles and the Jewish people of Eastern Europe. All three groups took different paths, but their journeys would soon bring them to America.

The Lower East Side The capital of Jewish America at the turn of the century was New York’s

Lower East Side.

This densely packed district of

tenements, factories, and

docklands was a starting point for

recent immigrants, and hundreds of thousands of the new arrivals from

Eastern Europe settled there on

arrival.

More than one-half of all Eastern European Jewish immigrants worked in manual occupations, predominantly in the garment industry.

Jewish family doing piecework in New York tenement, 1912

The Jewish neighborhoods of New York and Chicago were home to airless sweatshop factories, where women, teenagers, and children worked long hours cutting, sewing, and finishing clothing for pennies per piece.

Boss TweedPolitical Machine Leader for Tammany Hall in NYC! Controlled everything, from building projects, street cleaning, elections, pollution, etc…

Tweed hated the pictures

being drawn of him in the paper… He

didn’t care what they wrote and even took pride in it, but he said “the people can

see the pictures!!”

What if you didn’t come from Europe?

California’s Immigration

Station

We are all familiar with Ellis Island on the Atlantic coast, but many do not know of the existence of Angel Island on the Pacific coast where the incoming Asians were received.

Location of Angel

Island

Japanese "picture brides“ are a unique feature of Angel Island.

Generally these "picture brides" have never seen their future husbands, till meeting them at Angel Island.

These girls are given this curious name because their marriages are arranged

in Japan by photograph.

The 1908 Gentlemen's Agreement between the U.S. and Japan restricted immigration of laboring men,

but allowed wives.

Men frequently wed "picture brides" from their home villages in marriages that were arranged by their parents.

After an exchange of photographs and family histories, the bride would come to the United States.

Because the U.S. government didn't recognize the legality of such weddings until 1917,

group marriage ceremonies were conducted in immigration offices.

Issei (first generation) group and the next generation

The Chinese experience in America began with dreams of gold, as legends of instant wealth in California lured hopeful adventurers across the Pacific Ocean.

The railroads made use of this new pool of Chinese labor. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the U.S. railroad companies were expanding at a breakneck pace, straining to span the continents as quickly--and cheaply--as they could.

Since language barriers and racial discrimination barred them from many trades, however, they often launched new businesses.

Many of the shops, restaurants, and laundries in the growing mining towns of California were operated by Chinese immigrants.

In the face of a hostile public, and in response to hard times and legal exclusion, Chinese immigrants began to build communities unlike any others in North America: Chinatowns.

A Chinatown served as a safe haven and second home for Chinese immigrants, a place to shop for familiar food, to worship in a traditional temple, or to catch up on the news from the old country.

The door to the Chinese American dream was finally slammed shut in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This act was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history, and it excluded Chinese laborers from the country under penalty of imprisonment and deportation.

It also made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship.

Long before immigrants from other nations arrived on its shores, Native Americans called the North American continent their home. Today, the majority of Americans trace their family origins to a country other than the United States.

The United States has been characterized as a "melting pot" in which each ingredient blends into a single dish.

Likewise, the United States has been characterized as a "salad bowl" in which each ingredient reserves its own flavor and texture while contributing to the aggregate salad.

“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

Jimmy Carter