Immigration over the last 100 years

This research will trace the actions and attitudes of Americans toward immigrants over the past 100 years. The research will set forth elements and patterns of change and continuity that can be discerned from the behavior of Americans with regard to the presence and behavior of immigrants during this period and then discuss factors that appear to have influenced attitudes toward immigrants, as well as evaluate the influences themselves.

Until recently, America has been the promised land for millions throughout the world. That seemingly simple statement, however, conceals a more complex truth about the immigrant experience of America. For, as Barkan points out, "Migration involves the choices and actions of individual men and women and their families" (p. 4). This is true whether the individuals in question are making choices in their country of birth or in the United Sates. Thus, for some, America was the golden land of economic or social opportunity. For others, it was a refuge from oppression. For still others, it was (or it turned out to be) both. And for others, it was a disappointment, not least because of the kind of reception they received or because of their inability to transform their dream of America into their lived experience of reality.

Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Americans in general appear to have welcomed the newcomers. Workers were needed for the growing industries; farmers were needed to fill out the wide spaces in the West, and

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t confined to popular books or to socially marginal demagogues but in debates over national public policy and the rule of law. Consider the 1896 speech by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (whose grandson, also a senator, was on the Republican presidential ticket with Richard Nixon in the election of 1960) regarding the use of a literacy test for new immigrants, which had been proposed in 1894 by a Boston Brahmin group (Kraut, p. 163) as a means of selecting out immigrants from south and eastern Europe. The illiteracy test will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking emigrants or Germans, Scandinavians, and French. In other words, the races most affected by the illiteracy test are those whose emigration to this country has begun within the last twenty years and swelled rapidly to enormous proportions, races with which the English-speaking people have never hitherto assimilated, and who are most alien to the great body of the people of the United States (Lodge, Study Guide, p. 129). There is nothing very subtle or latent about this statement, which points up the presumption of the innate superiority of Anglo-American and nor

Category: History - I