Immigration since 1920

The beginnings

In American history, the ordinary people have been the most significant actors from the very beginning. America has always valued achievement and deliberately rejected hereditary privilege. In every society the things that actually happen are often far different from the things that are supposed to happen according to the accepted ideals, and this true of America too. Myths are influential, and the mythology of America is concerned with individual effort, enterprise, adventure, a practical belief in equal respect for all people, equality of opportunity, and through the free exchange of goods, fair reward for each person’s work.

The 20^th century has brought about 2 big new elements into the foundations of American life. On the one hand, the USA has become a great power, unable to avoid involvement and responsibility in international affairs. On the other hand, at home the old system of individualistic free enterprise has had to be supplemented by state intervention. But the American’s view of themselves and their ideals have not been greatly affected by these changes. Their past, and the myths connected with it have an immediate and continuing part to play in their present-day life.

The first settlement of North America from Europe was slow, hesitant and without plan.

In 1497 -1498 John Cabot made 2 pioneering journeys across the North Atlantic. On the first, in the ship Matthew, with a crew of 18, he reached islands off the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada. The second expedition, with several ships, sailed down the mainland coast to a point well south of what is now New York. Cabot was a Venetian who had settled in England. He was financed by merchants in Bristol, and supported by the English King Henry the VII. His expedition met native Americans and bartered European goods for furs. Cabot died soon after the second voyage, and his claim that the lands he had visited belonged to England was made quite unreal by the lack of any further expeditions for many decades.

During the 16^th century Spanish explorers went all along the western and southern coasts of North America and up the rivers. In 1609 they built a palace for the government of New Mexico on the plaza of their new town of Santa Fe, far north of the border of Mexico itself. The two thirds of the present US territory west of the Mississippi became part of the Spanish Empire, except for parts temporarily colonized by the French in the first half of the 19^th century.

The first northern settlements were unsuccessful. Some French Huguenots established themselves on the Atlantic Coast of Florida but were 2wiped out by a Spanish naval expedition which built a fort and founded the city of St. Augustine in 1565. Though it was Spanish for more than two hundred years it is considered to be the oldest city in the United States. Two attempts at colonizing North America from England failed in the 1580s. The first group of settlers stayed only for a year, the second vanished, and no trace of them has ever been found. But in 1607 a London merchants’ company gathered a group of men, some of them criminals released from prison. They landed at a place which they called Jamestown, a little way up one of the rivers which flow into Chesapeake Bay, in what is now Virginia – though that name, in honour of the English Queen Elizabeth I, had already been adopted to describe the whole of North America.

The Jamestown settlers were followed by others in the next few years, and by 1620 there were about a thousand. The settlers were allowed to have their own land and learned to grow tobacco.

When they remember the beginnings of their nation, Americans think not so much of the rather miserable Jamestown settlement, but of the English Puritans, now known as the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed at Cape Cod near Boston, in 1620. They had first left England, after conflict with the authorities over their refusal to comply with current religious laws, and spent a dozen years in exile at Leyden, Holland. There they planned to go to America, and in 1620 the small ship Mayflower took them, and others who joined them in England, across the Atlantic. In November The Mayflower reached Cape Cod, on the coast of what is now Massachusetts, and they decided to stay there, at a place near modern Boston, which they called Plymouth, after the English port from which they had sailed.

The Pilgrim Fathers suffered terrible hardships at first, and half of them died during their first winter months; but those who survived for the first year managed to live on fish and reap a harvest from the land in the summer, with the help of friendly native Americans. A year after they arrived, another ship came from England, and they celebrated this arrival, and the harvest they had gathered with a feast of thanksgiving. The anniversary of their thanksgiving feast is still celebrated every November as a public holiday. Thanksgiving and Independence Day are the 2 great occasions by which Americans remember each year the 2 main stages in their national history, foundation and independence. Between 1620 – 1640 the Pilgrim Fathers were followed by many more shiploads of settlers in New England. During the same period New Amsterdam was founded from Holland on the small island of Manhattan

In 1664 the English took over the colony and changed the name to New York.

The last of the main foundations came in 1682. At this time the Quakers had become the most energetic representatives in England of the Puritan tradition, and William Penn, a prominent English Quaker, led a group of religious sympathizers to settle in Pennsylvania.

The idealistic motives which inspired the first migrants to New England in 1620 – 1640 still remain important for the American picture of themselves. These early settlers were for the most part religious people, although religion was not the only source of inspiration for their enterprise. Many wanted to escape from the oppressive religious and social atmosphere of England. Most of them were Protestants not ready to accept the religious practice of the Church of England which had been evolved from the reformation. In England their beliefs caused them inconvenience and sometimes danger. When they came to America they were determined to build a new society which was free of the bad elements of the old, and preserve those elements which seemed to them good.

In the 18^th century the settlements along the east coast were organized as 13th colonies, each with a governor, under British rule. Relations with the home government were not always good. The colonies grew and developed, many people came from Britain, Holland and Germany. In fact, many of the settlers did not come willingly. Some had to serve for long periods to pay for their transport, some were convicts, transported to America instead of being hanged; some were thieves or murderers. And there was always the flood of slaves brought over from Africa and sold to work in the plantations of the South.

When the colonies declared their independence in 1776 they were still predominantly British in their origin and their outlook. Later immigrants of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries were for the most part not brought to America by the same ideals which inspired the Pilgrim Fathers and the settlers who went with William Penn. The people from Ireland, Poland and Italy in particular, went to America in order to escape from intolerable poverty in their own home countries, and they were regarded as inferiors by the Americans of earlier generations. Even so however different the position of the new arrivals as compared with the old, there is still an important element in common among them. All were in rebellion against something which they did not like in their own environments and all were prepared to take great risks and face great hardships in trying to build a new life for themselves. All white American-born citizens today are descended from people who at some time made a decision to move from Europe. This very fact gives them a common cultural background and they are very conscious of sharing it.

The picture of early America would not be complete without reference to the special type of development in the South, with a rural economy and organization different from that of the northern states. The first settlements in Virginia were commercial ventures. English investors made money from the tobacco they planted. Cotton plantations further south demanded labour on a large scale. The population of the European origin was supplemented by African slaves who seemed necessary to the economy of the South.

The ideals of the Pilgrim Fathers and those who settled in the northern states were based on the idea that all people were equal in the sight of God and that they should have equal opportunity. Yet in the South the plantations produced a social structure far more rigidly divided than that of the old England which the Pilgrim Fathers had rejected. From the beginning many Americans in the North found slavery offensive to their philosophy while people in the South not only accepted slavery but also broke from the Union to preserve it. It took 4 years of war to bring them back and to free the slaves, but inequality survived

2.2. The century of massive settlement: 1820 – 1920

When the United States became independent in 1783 the settled part of the country consisted of farming communities spread along the east coast. The territory of the new Republic, with about 4 million people, extended only as far west as the Mississippi. The area around the Mississippi area had been so little penetrated that the French had built up their city of New Orleans early in the 18^th century. But in 1762 the French gave up all claims there to Spain. The Spanish took little interest in the area, and in 1803, by the “Louisiana Purchase”, the USA acquired the whole western part of the Mississippi-Missouri basin.

The coming of independence did not lead immediately to a great new wave of people. Probably only about 150,000 people settled in the USA between 1789 and 1820. In 1790 over 4/5 of the population were said to be of British origin. Early American society was very British, in the sense that British ideas and ways of living had been taken to a new environment and adapted to it.

About 1820 the flow of new settlers from Europe began to increase dramatically. Between 1820 and 1840 over a million people migrated to the USA., nearly 10 times as many as in the previous 20 years, and many were from Ireland and continental Europe.

The development of steamships made the conditions of traveling easier, though by any modern standards were still terrible.

The 40 years 1840 – 1880, brought almost ten million migrants to America or a quarter of a million a year: 50 times as many as in the early years of the century. Many of the migrants of this period came from Germany, and for the rest of the 19^th century German migration was no less important than that from Great Britain. There were also great numbers from Ireland escaping from the poverty and famine of their country, whose population fell rapidly during this period. The Germans , mainly Protestants, were assimilated easily enough into English-American society, but the Irish kept rather more separate. They did not need to learn an entirely new language (though some were Irish-speaking), but they were nearly all Catholics, full of resentment at the domination of their own home country by the English, and particularly by the English protestant landlords. So the new Irish-Americans saved money to come and join them. Irish immigrants met some hostile prejudice after a time. They were supposed to be unreliable, and they certainly threatened the Protestant domination. There were notices outside factories: “No Irish need apply”.

For many of the migrants of this time the move involved not only a change of homeland, but a change from farm to factory, from country to town. American industry was developing rapidly from the east coast to Chicago and beyond, and many of the new migrants were involved in the factories that were growing up everywhere.

By the middle of the century the USA had a larger population than any single European country, and by 1880 it reached 50 million.

By 1880 there were large communities in which most of the adults had been born in Europe. Many of the new arrivals were following friends and relatives who had come already. There were some compact national groups, particularly of Germans. It might have been possible for large areas to become homes for compact ethnic groups maintaining the German language and German customs, and so building up new little Germanies on the American continent, but in practice this never happened. Groups of Germans did keep their national identity and they did live together, but they were always assimilated into the general pattern of American culture.

Perhaps the civil war (1861 -1865) had some influence in the development of national consciousness.

The war settled the question whether the US should remain one political unit or split into two. The people newly arrived from Europe had nearly all settled in the North and could easily identify themselves with the northern position. To them the South was like a foreign country, and their share in the victory made it possible for them to have a greater consciousness of being American.

More than 3 quarters of a million people crossed as settlers in 1882 and the flow continued, with some big fluctuations. One tenth of the whole population of Sweden and Norway left for America in only ten years, 1881- 1890. The Swedes were escaping from poverty in a northern European country which was still dominated by the aristocracy and still economically backward. Yet the very time of the great Swedish migration was also the time of the beginning of Swedish industrial development. Then, we know, Sweden came to a standard of living unequalled in the USA. Like the Germans, the Swedes tended on the whole to move to the Midwest.

Migration was stimulated by the activities of German and other shipping companies and by the offers of cheap transport which they spread around areas of European poverty.

Twelve million immigrants came in 1900 – 1914, and during the final years of the First World War, three-quarters of the new arrivals came from Eastern Europe and Italy. They were on the whole regarded as inferiors, and they were conscious of having started late in the race for wealth and prestige in the society they had come to join. It was a great advantage at this time to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), and a disadvantage to be a Catholic or a Jew, or from Italy or from Eastern Europe. These new groups often lived in communities. Being different in so many obvious ways from the established Americans, they found it hard to get themselves accepted.

Immigration since 1920

After the First World War, migration from Europe was on a much smaller scale. In 1921 new rules restricted the number of immigration allowed from each country – and favoured northern Europeans. they allowed less than 6,000 people a year from Italy, but ten times as many from Britain – though the quotas were amended after 1929.

But soon the great depression then the Second World War, played their part in restricting the flow further still, and since then the small numbers coming from Europe have been very different from the earlier generations. Professors, engineers, scientists and doctors have come , particularly form Britain, to better conditions of work and much higher pay than they would find in Europe. Intellectuals and specialists of every kind have brought their special skills to reinforce American industry, commerce, education, research, arts and entertainment. Many of these people have received their education and training at the expense of the taxpayers of their own home countries.

Even among these well-qualified people, some have been refugees from persecution. It would have been hard one single group who have brought such benefits to America as the Jews who escaped from Germany and Austria, many of them after experiencing great difficulties, both at home and on the way.

Immigration from Europe has declined even more since 1950s, though the flow of doctors, nurses and scientists from Britain caused anxiety in that country about what is called the 'brain drain' to America. Fewer European settlers came in the 15 years form1970 to 1985 than in one year of 1907. One reason for the change is the increasing prosperity of Western Europe, another the difficulty of leaving Eastern Europe. But there are plenty of people living temporarily in the USA, with permits to work but not to stay indefinitely. There is not only a brain drain, but also a continuous flow both ways across the Atlantic as professors and managers make their careers partly on one side, partly on the other side, bringing America and Europe closer to each other. Meanwhile, the main sources of immigration have been increasingly outside Europe, mainly Central America and the Caribbean but also Asia, and to a lesser extent from Africa. By the 1960s quite large numbers had come from the American Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico, and then after 1959, many thousands of opponents of the new regime in Cuba were accepted as refugees. At that time it was widely felt that the old immigration policy had been racist. In response to this, quotas for countries in Africa and Asia were increased or allowed for the 1^st time.

One and a half million came from Asia in the 1970s, ten times as many as in the 1950s, and the flow from Asia grew in th 1980s. But the biggest source of immigrants since the 1960s has been Latin America, particularly Mexico – and among the people from Mexico the biggest element has probably been illegal. The 2 thousand kilometre border between the USA and Mexico is not very difficult to cross. There are no mines or other frightening obstacles. There are guards, but they do not shoot. Every year they catch tens of thousands trying to cross and send t hem back, but tens of thousands make their way without being caught. They are not all Mexicans, some come through Mexico from Guatemala or further south.

According to the official figures, the USA has lately been receiving about half a million immigrants a year. But the figures do not include the uncounted people who come from Mexico illegally. It is generally believed that the true figure is several times as great.

In 1987 a new form of indirect control of immigration was brought into effect, against the wishes of some business interests as well as humanitarian liberals. It became a punishable offence to employ people without proper documentation. As a result, the number of people caught trying to enter the USA illegally from Mexico declined, Meanwhile, people who can show that they have worked in the US for 5 years can apply for, and normally obtain documents entitling them to stay and eventually to apply for naturalization as US citizen.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1103