in 1865 to 1898 what were the reasons for the changing attitudes towards immigrants

Introduction

Is the United States "a nation of immigrants," a "land of opportunity," and refuge for the earth's persecuted and poor? Is the country made stronger past its power to welcome and absorb people from around the world? Or are the new arrivals a burden? Should the United States close its borders to immigrants considering of their numbers, their countries of origin, their politics, religions, financial means, educational levels, or medical conditions—all of which have been factors in one or more immigration laws over the by 150 years? What does it hateful to exist an immigrant, to be built-in in ane country and spend much of i's life in some other? What consequences does immigration have for the individuals, families, and communities who migrate?

Almost since the founding of the commonwealth, Americans and their legislators have weighed the benefits of welcoming new citizens from around the globe against the benefits of restricting immigration, monitoring the activities of the foreign built-in in the United States, and narrowing the path to citizenship.

Debates over immigration dominate today's newspaper headlines and political campaigns. These debates may be new in some of their particular concerns (the border with Mexico, Islamist terrorism), but many of the questions raised and arguments presented would have been deeply familiar to a reader in 1900. Almost since the founding of the republic, Americans and their legislators have weighed the benefits of welcoming new citizens from around the world against the benefits of restricting clearing, monitoring the activities of the strange born in the United states, and narrowing the path to citizenship. One line of argue has focused on the event of political influence and, specifically, the fear that foreigners within the United States promoted political radicalism. With the Conflicting and Sedition Acts of 1798, the U.S. Congress and President John Adams sought to limit the influence of the French Revolution by deporting certain immigrants and closing immigrant-owned, opposition presses on the grounds of treason. In the late nineteenth century, clearing laws specifically forbade entry to any suspected anarchists; Communists would be targeted later in the twentieth century.

Some other line of debate over clearing has focused on its economic bear upon. U.S. policy makers have vacillated betwixt accommodating agricultural and industrial employers, who demanded a wide, cheap, and oftentimes temporary labor pool, and workers, who objected that the influx of immigrant labor created besides much contest and drove downward wages. Clearing from Latin America, for example, may seem the overriding issue today, just was not restricted at all until 1965, largely considering of the demand for Mexican agricultural labor in Southwestern and Western states. The Chinese, in dissimilarity, became the starting time ethnic group specifically barred from entry to the Usa with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, passed under pressure from white workers' organizations in the Westward that resented Chinese contest for jobs in mining and railroad construction.

Finally, debates over immigration oftentimes turn on understandings of cultural divergence and on changing expectations of how foreign-born people should adapt to and participate in American society. There have ever been two primary paths to U.S. citizenship: One is through being born in the United States. The other is through naturalization, the legal procedure past which individuals apply for and are admitted to citizenship. Just across this legal procedure, what are the expectations of citizenship? What is the process of assimilation, or assimilation into, American culture? Can immigrants retain the customs or languages of their countries of origin and participate sufficiently in American guild or are these practices in conflict? And which groups—government officials, politicians, journalists, "native-born" citizens, or immigrants themselves—should be in a position to decide?

This collection explores the subject field of clearing in U.Due south. history with item attending to the ii and a half decades from 1890 to the showtime of World State of war I. As historian Roger Daniels explains in Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy Since 1882, the late nineteenth century witnessed an enormous increase in the number of arriving immigrants. More immigrants—11.7 million—came to the United States between 1871 and 1901 than had arrived in the United States and the British North American colonies during the preceding three centuries combined. (The U.Due south. population was 76.2 million in 1900.) Betwixt 1900 and 1914, 12.9 meg new immigrants arrived. These turn-of-the-century immigrants came primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, and were largely Italians, Jews, and Poles.

This menses also saw significant changes in the government'due south management of immigration. In 1891, the U.Southward. Congress determined that the issue would fall, exclusively, under national control. Congress removed whatsoever power that state commissions had previously held and established a new federal Agency of Clearing. In 1892, the Bureau opened the Ellis Island immigrant receiving station in New York, through which approximately 70 per centum of all immigrants would pass over the coming decades. Federal laws proceeded to restrict immigration over the coming decades, culminating in the passage of the Immigration Deed of 1924. This human activity imposed a national quota system based on the 1890 census. As a effect, foreign countries were allotted a specific number of almanac entries to the United States in proportion to their presence in the U.s. in 1890. The deed favored nationalities such as English language, Irish gaelic, and Germans who had arrived before 1890 and severely limited arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe. No numerical limit was placed on clearing from Northward or South America. Asians were completely excluded as they remained ineligible for citizenship. Other categories of people were excluded because they were deemed criminals or otherwise immoral, paupers (very poor people), contract laborers, political radicals, illiterates, or physically or mentally unfit. In 1943, Congress repealed the exclusion acts and established quotas for people from Asian countries. Only the 1924 law remained largely in effect until the Immigration Act of 1965, which concluded the national quotas system.

The documents hither approach the history of clearing and citizenship from several different angles: national and personal identity, the experience of immigration, immigrant life in the cities, and political debates over immigration.

Please consider the post-obit equally you review the documents

• What office has clearing played in the formation of America's national identity? In what ways are immigrants key to American ideals and in what ways have they been seen as threats to those ideals?
• Identify the terms of argue regarding the social effects of immigration. What arguments have people fabricated most the touch on of immigration on American gild? What have been the perceived consequences—positive and negative—of new arrivals from around the world?
• Consider the experience of clearing. How do writings past immigrants contribute to the debates over immigration? How do they reframe our understanding of both personal and national identity?

Nation of Immigrants

These three documents represent dissimilar moments in what is now a long tradition of defining America equally a nation of immigrants. Crèvecoeur offers one of the earliest formulations of this idea—and of the metaphor of different races "melted" together—in this passage from Messages from an American Farmer, written at the start of the American Revolution. Crèvecoeur was born in France in 1735 and moved to the British colony of New York at the age of 24, where he bought a large subcontract and settled down to enhance a family unit seven years before the first of the state of war. In Messages from an American Farmer, he adopts the persona of James, a Pennsylvania farmer, who writes to a friend in England to explain American ways. (Ironically, Crèvecoeur did not favor American independence from England and lost his family also as his farm in New York in the violence of the Revolution.) "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner" appeared in the magazine Harper's Weekly merely iv years after the shut of the Ceremonious War, as many Americans were trying to envision national identity in the wake of such a profound internal rupture. It also responds to early on debates effectually restricting Chinese clearing. The poet Emma Lazarus grew upward in New York in a Jewish family unit of Portuguese descent in the nineteenth century. After 1879, she became specially concerned about the persecution of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe. She wrote this poem in 1883 to help enhance money for a pedestal for the Statue of Freedom on Ellis Island. This verse form was installed on a bronze plaque inside the statue in 1903, after her expiry. [Please note: The quondam colossus mentioned at the start of the poem is the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient earth. The twin cities are New York and Brooklyn, non yet consolidated into one entity.]

Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," in The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889)

Questions to Consider

1. According to Crèvecoeur (or his narrator, James), in what ways does America differ from Europe? What is the character of an American? In what way is he a "new man, who acts upon new principles"?
2. How does America benefit from its ethnic diversity? What happens to the different national cultures of European immigrants in America? Are distinct national identities preserved?
3. Why do yous remember that Crèvecoeur created an ethnically English character to characterize his work and personify the "American farmer"? Why practise you recall African Americans and Native Americans are absent-minded from his sketch of a representative American?
4. Examine the illustration "Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner." Which indigenous and racial groups are represented? How are people arranged around Uncle Sam's table? Is there a hierarchy or exercise they appear to exist equals? Why do you lot recall that Nast chose to include family groups? Who do the pictures on the wall behind them portray?
5. Examine the captions within the illustration. What is the illustrator's message? What practise you recollect is the significance of the analogy's timing, just 4 years after the close of the Civil War?
6. Identify America'southward characteristics, as personified by the Statue of Freedom. Which terms does Lazarus use to describe the Statue? Compare Lady Liberty to Uncle Sam. How does gender affect the meaning of each of these personifications of America?
7. How are immigrants portrayed in Lazarus poem? What are their reasons for coming to the United States? What, according to Lazarus, is America's function in the world?

Immigration Debates in Cartoons

These political cartoons from two popular nineteenth-century magazines both take up the question of whether specific national groups should be excluded from American life. The Harper'due south illustration responded to a bill in the New York legislature that proposed to fine and imprison anyone who hired Chinese contract workers. The analogy accompanied a brief column describing the bill and dismissing the alleged threat of a "Chinese invasion" confronting which American workers must be protected. The columnist ended that "A majority in this land nevertheless adhere to the old Revolutionary doctrine that all men are created free and equal earlier the police force, and possess certain inalienable rights." Eighteen years later, the Puck cartoon takes a quite dissimilar approach to the controversy concerning Irish immigrants. This cartoon accompanied an editorial that argued that the United States, like European countries, had adult "a national type… This blazon is strong plenty to assimilate to itself all foreign types which fall fairly nether its influence." However, the editorial goes on to criticize supporters of Irish independence from England as "a class of voters who are American only in name, and Irish in feeling and conduct." Both cartoons personify America equally Columbia, a goddess-similar embodiment of the nation who appears in art and literature from the eighteenth century frontward.

C. J. Taylor, "The Mortar of Absorption–And the One Chemical element that Won't Mix", in Puck (1889)

Questions to Consider

1. Depict the different figures in the Harper's illustration—the Chinese man, Columbia, and the mob of white men on the correct. What are their postures? How exercise they relate to each other?
2. Examine the posters on the wall behind Columbia and the Chinese human. What arguments exercise they make against Chinese immigration? What do the posters too every bit the representation of the white mob suggest about its class composition? What evidence do you see that the mob may resort to violence?
3. The explanation reads: "Columbia—'Hands off, gentlemen! America ways Fair Play for All Men.'" How do the caption and other elements of the illustration refute the anti-Chinese motility?
4. In the Puck cartoon, the man on the rim of the bowl wears a banner that reads "Blaine Irishman" and carries a flag with Irish gaelic writing. How does the man appear? How does his advent back up and explain the caption? How does Columbia respond to him?
5. What does the process of assimilation—or cultural absorption—involve, according to this representation?

Experiences of Immigrants

These documents stand for various experiences that were shared by many immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1924: being inspected at Ellis Island, performing or seeking work, getting lost or searching for relatives who accept been lost in transit, and attending civics and English linguistic communication classes. The photographs appear in Edward Alsworth Ross' The Erstwhile World in the New. Ross, a professor of folklore at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, takes a fiercely anti-immigrant stance in his volume. However, these photographs, taken by journalists and reformers, offering a compelling tape of immigrant experiences and a counterweight to Ross' rhetoric, examined after in this collection. Edith Abbott was an economist, social worker, and educator who helped establish the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) at the University of Chicago and served xviii years as its dean. These documents are selected from a source volume that she compiled from regime records, scholarly manufactures, and other sources for the benefit of SSA students.

Pick: Edith Abbott, "Line Inspection at Ellis Island" and "Immigrant Girls Traveling Solitary who Failed to Attain their Destination" and Grace Abbott, "The Unskilled Immigrant in Chicago" in Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records, 244-247, 418 and 610-611 (1924).

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  Edith Abbott, "Line Inspection at Ellis Island," in Immigration: Select Documents and Instance Records, 244-245 (1924)

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  Edith Abbott, "Line Inspection at Ellis Island," in Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records, 246-247 (1924)

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  Edith Abbott, "Immigrant Girls Traveling Alone Who Failed to Reach Destination," in Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records, 610-611 (1924)

• 

  Grace Abbott, "The Unskilled Immigrant in Chicago," in Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records, 481 (1924)

Questions to Consider

1. Depict the photographed women in line at Ellis Island. How are they dressed? What do their expressions or postures tell y'all?
2. According to the essay "Line Inspection at Ellis Island," written past a Bureau of Immigration inspector, what process did people go through when they arrived at Ellis Island? Describe the techniques that inspectors used to determine if a person was eligible for admission to the United States. How did inspectors sort the admitted people from those requiring further examination? Which physical and mental conditions disqualified a person from admission? What other attributes rendered a person "unfit"? How do you recall you would feel going through this inspection?
3. Draw the women at piece of work in Chicago in the two photographs. What kind of piece of work practice they do and, as far every bit you tin tell, nether what conditions? How are they dressed? Compare these women to those in line at Ellis Island.
4. Co-ordinate to Grace Abbott (Edith's sister and a social worker and policy maker) in "The Unskilled Immigrant in Chicago," what challenges did immigrant men face in finding work?
5. Consider the photographs of people attending civics and English language classes. What is the purpose of these classes, especially tailored to immigrants?

Neighborhoods and Tenements

Selection: Samuel Sewell Greeley, Nationalities Map No. i-4, Polk St. to Twelfth, Chicago (1895)

The groovy majority of turn-of-the-century immigrants settled in cities, such equally New York and Chicago. The two maps included in this section offer graphic representations of the distribution of immigrants at both local and national levels. Samuel Sewell Greeley'south Nationalities Map was published past Hull House in 1895 as part of a projection to document and describe how people lived and worked in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Hull House was a settlement house established in Chicago's Near W Side slum as part of a motility to redress the widening gulf between the poor and the affluent in America'south cities. Middle-class women and men lived at Hull House and provided services, classes, and organizational support to people in the neighborhood. In social club to gather data to create this map and others, staff from Hull House and the federal Bureau of Labor went through the neighborhood house past business firm and asked residents about their indigenous origins, their work and wages, and the number of people in their households. Edward Alsworth Ross, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, saw the urban settlement patterns of immigrants as a problem. He argued that the new arrivals would overwhelm cities' capacities to provide housing and other services. Ross created this map to illustrate the concentration of new immigrants in cities throughout the United States.

Indeed, the work of Jacob Riis vividly portrays the difficult living conditions that many immigrants faced in New York Metropolis. Riis was a Danish immigrant, who experienced severe poverty himself before becoming a celebrated photographer and social reformer advocating on behalf of the urban poor. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis documented weather in the slums of New York's Lower E Side—at the fourth dimension, the most densely populated place on earth. Unlike Ross, who sought to address urban weather condition by severely restricting the flow of new immigrants, Riis responded to these atmospheric condition past seeking to change them. He initiated a campaign to reform building codes and ameliorate living conditions in the tenements, the dark, crowded, over-priced structures which housed three-quarters of New York'due south population.

Selection: Clarification of Tenement Buildings (pages 18-20), "The Bend," and "Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their Tenement" from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis (1890).

Questions to Consider

1. Examine the Nationalities Map closely. Which nationalities and races are represented here and in what proportions? (Please note: Bohemian refers to people at present known equally Czech.) What criteria were used to define each group? On what basis exercise you think the map's creator decided which color to assign each grouping?
2. On the Nationalities Map, what patterns do yous notice in the distribution of specific ethnic groups throughout the neighborhood? Are groups evenly dispersed? What exercise you find surprising about the neighborhood'southward composition? How does it compare to the ethnic limerick of your neighborhood?
3. As illustrated in Ross' map, where did contempo immigrants settle in the Us in 1910?
4. Study Riis' diagram and description of the tenement building. Where are the windows and doors? What would the middle rooms of the tenement accept been like? What do yous think information technology would have been similar to alive in such a building?
5. What do these photographs, taken by Riis himself, tell u.s. about immigrants' lives in New York?

Nativism

Edward Ross was a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early twentieth century. He endorsed nativism, or the favoring of native-born inhabitants over immigrants, and advocated astringent restrictions on clearing. In the preface to this volume, he responds to people who see the welcoming of new immigrants as role of America's autonomous and humanitarian hope by writing, "I am not of those who consider humanity and forget the nation, who pity the living only not the unborn…I regard [America] as a nation whose future may exist of unspeakable value to the residual of flesh, provided that the easier weather condition of life here exist made permanent by high standards of living, institutions and ideals…We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came." He gain to fence that "the original brand-upwards of the American people" was English Puritans, French Protestants, Germans, and Scotch-Irish. He laments that recent immigrants are predominantly Italian, Slavic, and Jewish.

Selection: Edward Alsworth Ross, "Social Effects of Clearing" and Appendix Data, in The Former World and the New (1914).

Questions to Consider

1. How does Ross describe recent immigrants? Why does he believe that they pose such a trouble for American society?
2. Which groups of Americans are left out of his discussion of original and "new" immigrants?
3. Do yous believe that Ross' arguments are just a cover for prejudice against sure nationalities? Is at that place whatever legitimate basis for his claims? How would y'all respond to his arguments?

Immigration and Identity

While the readings that open this collection address the result of national identity, these texts by W. E. B. DuBois and Mary Antin explore questions concerning personal identity. DuBois was a prominent African American intellectual and civil rights advocate who, in The Souls of Blackness Folk, examined the history of African Americans and their place within American society. DuBois grew upward in Massachusetts, relatively sheltered from racism, and earned a PhD at Harvard. But he lived in an America defined by Plessy 5. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court decision that introduced the doctrine of "separate but equal" and upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation. In this passage, DuBois considers what it means to be both black and American in a discussion that resonates with immigrant writers who wonder what it means to be both American and Irish or Italian or any other ethnicity. Mary Antin was born into a Jewish family in Polotzk, Russian federation, in 1881 and moved with her family to Boston when she was xiii years old. Although her begetter struggled to back up the family, Antin received a potent instruction at the local public schools and grew up to become a celebrated author and lecturer on the immigrant feel. Her autobiography, The Promised State, portrays her childhood in Polotzk and Boston, contrasting the persecution and oppression that Jews experienced in Russia to the opportunity and success she found in America.

Choice: Due west. Due east. B. Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," in The Souls of Black Folk, three-4 (1903).

Selection: Mary Antin, The Promised Land, xii-15, 364 (1912).

Questions to Consider

1. How does DuBois characterize the experience of beingness African American at the plough of the twentieth century? What does he mean by "this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the record of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (p. 3)?
2. How exercise you interpret Antin's argument: "I am absolutely other than the person whose story I accept to tell" (p. i)? What does she hateful when she writes of experiencing "more than 1 nativity of myself" (p. xii)? What exercise these lines suggest about Antin's relationship to the past?
3. Consider how Antin develops the commonly used metaphors of Old Globe and New World to refer, respectively, to Eastern Europe and the United States. What does she mean when she writes, "I began life in the Middle Ages" (p. xiii)? What are the implications of conflating history and geography in this mode?
4. Both DuBois and Antin evoke an experience of double identity—DuBois' "double-consciousness" or, in Antin'due south words, existence "of ii worlds." What practise they mean by these phrases? In what ways are their formulations of African American and Jewish American identity similar and in what ways are they different? Do they have the aforementioned feelings toward their feel of doubleness? Do they seek the aforementioned sort of reconciliation? What, ultimately, are their feelings for America?

Selected Sources

Roger Daniels. Guarding the Gilt Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. 2004. pp. 27–58.

Mae Grand. Ngai. Incommunicable Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. 2004. pp. 227–264.

Robert Siegel. Jacob Riis: Shedding Light On NYC'southward "Other Half."

Jewish Women'southward Annal

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Source: https://dcc.newberry.org/?p=14423

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