Hello, ceplair-ga!
Thank you for such an interesting question! I have a special interest
in this topic, since my maternal grandmother came from Hungary, and my
maternal grandfather came from Austria. However, their arrival through
Ellis Island was after 1900. Nevertheless, I am very proud to be part
of their history, courage, spirit and sense of adventure. They left
families behind in an effort to better their lives and I herald their
bravery.
Since your question asked specifically about New European immigrants,
I have tried to address only those portions of history that affected
(and may still affect) this population, focusing on the time period
from 1864-1900, as well as later laws that impacted the new European
immigrants. Though there were laws enacted that were specifically
directed at the Asian population, particularly the Chinese, I have
stayed away from that aspect of history, unless it has some relevance
to your question.
Who were the New Immigrants?
****************************
The European immigrants that entered the United States during the
latter half of the nineteenth century are often referred to as the
"New Immigrants." As opposed to the "Old Immigrants," who came to the
United States in the early 1800's from northern and western Europe,
and were mostly skilled and literate, the "New Immigrants" hailed from
the southern and eastern portions of Europe and tended to be
unskilled, illiterate workers.
Read "The Italian Immigrant Experience in America (1870-1920)," by
Joan Rapczynski.
Immigration and American Life. 1999. Volume III. Yale-New Haven
Teachers Institute.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1999/3/99.03.04.x.html
"...by the 1880s most "new immigrants" were arriving from southern and
eastern European countries such as Italy, Poland and Russia. Like
their Irish predecessors, most of these new arrivals were poor and
uneducated. Many were peasants from rural regions who were being
pushed out by Europe's industrial revolution."
From "American Immigration Past and Present."
http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/activity/immigration/
Numbers of Immigrants
*********************
"Before the 20th Century, immigration to America was virtually
unlimited. Between 1860 and 1885, 8 million immigrants arrived in
America. 9 out of 10 came from Northern and Western Europe. In the
latter part of the period, immigrants began to arrive from countries
on the Southern and Eastern part of Europe. These groups eventually
represented the majority of immigrants. As a result, Congress passed
an exclusion law giving it the responsibility of regulating
immigration. That responsibility still lies with Congress."
From "Graphing Immigration Data," by Mary Elizabeth Jones. Immigration
and American Life. 1999. Volume III. Yale-New Haven Teachers
Institute.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1999/3/99.03.04.x.html
Did American welcome the Immigrant Population?
**********************************************
At the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor is this famous
poem by Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus."
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles...
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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!"
"Lazarus' poem is a message to all potential immigrants as well as a
statement of philosophy. By placing this message on the base of
America's most recognizable symbol we establish what are policy should
be. America, as previously stated, is a nation founded by and for
immigrants. Everyone in America, with the exception of native
Americans, are immigrants."
Most surprising is the attitude of the "Old Immigrants," who had
arrived in American only a few decades earlier, toward the "New
Immigrants." Angered by the new wave of immigration, "nativist" groups
like the "Know nothings" emerged which promoted anti-immigrant
sentiment. A major worry was that the New Immigrants would saturate
the job market and take away employment from those Americans who had
arrived from Europe in the "not so far away" past.
Read "To What Exent Has the United States Welcomed Immigrants?" Unit
5: Onto a World Stage. American History and Government.
http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/Lesson_55_Notes.htm
=====
The formation of the Dillingham Commission provides a good look into
the growing sentiment in America against the "New European
Immigrants."
"Before the 1880s, according to the Commission, most migrants to the
United States had arrived from northern and western Europe. After the
1880s, however, "inferior" migrants from places in southeastern
Europe, such as Austria--Hungary, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania,
Romania, and Greece, increasingly dominated European immigration."
The Dillingham Commission was formed in 1907 to examine the growing
problems and consequences associated with immigration. One of the
outcomes of the commission was to institute a policy of "literacy
tests" to prevent the influx of immigrant similar to the illiterate,
"New Europeans."
Read "Foreign Immigrants in Industrial America," by Stanley K.
Schultz. American History 102.
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture08.html
Immigrants and their effect on US Labor and Industrialization
**************************************************************
There is no doubt that the thousand of new immigrants arriving from
Europe had a tremendous impact on the labor supply in the United
States. In fact, the large influx of immigrants and their addition to
the labor force made the U.S. period of rapid industrialization
possible.
===
"In addition to the natural resources, an abundant labor supply,
augmented by the yearly arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants
between 1865 and 1900, contributed to the rapid industrialization of
the US. The massive influx of European and Asian immigrants increased
the population from 5 million in 1800 to over 75 million by 1900. This
large increase provided a cheap source of labor and created a greater
demand for industrial products."
From "Rise of Industrial America-An Overview." Unit 7 Age of
Enterprise, 1860-1900
http://www.averillpark.k12.ny.us/academics/US_History/unit7.html
=====
"The 1880s was a time of high unemployment, growing labor unrest,
political corruption, and urban decay. These problems would likely
have taken hold even without immigrants from southeastern Europe. Many
Americans, however, were eager to blame immigrants from southeastern
Europe as the culprits behind the new problems."
In the 1880's, many American businessmen thought that the new wave of
immigrants would be good for the economy by providing a large pool of
laborers. It didn't particularly matter that these "New Immigrants"
were unskilled, since they were especially suited to work in the
nation's factories.
As workers became more disgruntled about working conditions and
strikes began to become common, the New Immigrants were blamed as
being the instigators of unrest. The Haymarket Square Riot of 1886 was
blamed on a group of German immigrants, and fear and distrust of
European immigrants began to sweep the general population.
Read "Foreign Immigrants in Industrial America," by Stanley K.
Schultz. American History 102.
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture08.html
====
The Alien Contract Labor Law:
"The 1885 Alien Contract Labor law presents one example of the
difficulties of enforcing legislation without federal participation.
Intended to protect the wages of American laborers, this law made it a
criminal offense to import aliens under any prior contract for the
performance of labor or service of any kind. The law made no provision
for enforcement of its terms through inspection or deportation, and
the states could not enforce it."
From "Ellis Island Floor Plan." History Channel.
http://www.historychannel.com/ellisisland/gateway/intro2.html
=====
Contract Labor Law, July 4, 1864
(US Statutes at Large, vol. XIII, p. 386) Be it enacted...
Sec. 2. That all contracts that shall be made by emigrants to the
United States in foreign countries, in conformity to regulations that
may be established... whereby emigrants shall pledge the wages of
their labor for a term not exceeding twelve monthes, to repay the
expenses of their emigration, shall be held to be valid in law, and
may be enforced in the Courts of the United States, or of the several
states and territories; and such advances, if so stipulated in the
contract... shall operate as alien up on any land thereafter aquired
by the emigrant....
From http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/cll-64.html
Government Laissez-faire attitude toward the economy
*****************************************************
Laissez Faire was a government policy of non-interference toward
business and the economy.This policy fostered a non-caring attitude by
the government toward the extreme separation between the elite and the
working class, basically leaving the poor to look after themselves
with no protection or government assistance. Obviously, the New
European Immigrants made up a large portion of the working-class poor
that suffered under this policy.
From "General Info: Working Class."
http://hammer.prohosting.com/~penz/encycl/l1encyc.htm
"Although the federal government was actively aiding business growth
by erecting tariff walls, providing subsidies, land grants and tax
relief to industry, they claimed to employ an economic policy of
laissez-faire or "hands off" with respect to the economy. In short,
the federal government intervened in the economy (including issuing
injunctions and sending troops to prevent work stoppages) to assist
the growth of industry without regulating business activities."
From "Rise of Industrial America-An Overview." Unit 7 Age of
Enterprise, 1860-1900
http://www.averillpark.k12.ny.us/academics/US_History/unit7.html
=====
"The rapid growth of American industry after the Civil War brought to
a head a host of social problems. As industry expanded in the wake of
the industrial revolution, it consolidated into ever larger units. As
corporations merged, wealth was slowly concentrated into the hands of
fewer persons, such that by 1890 one percent of the families in
America owned more than one half of the wealth of the nation. This
concentrated wealth--by overshadowing the individual and corrupting
government officials-- threatened to destroy the political equality
that had been won earlier in the century."
"This industrial machine left individuals feeling insignificant and
powerless. Labor tried unsuccessfully to create a counterbalance to
concentrated capital. This led to bloody strikes in 1877, 1886, 1892,
and 1894."
From "The Origins of the Social Gospel." The Social Gospel: Lecture
19.
http://www.wfu.edu/~matthetl/perspectives/nineteen.html
=====
"Pre-industrial America had prided itself on its lack of
European-style slums. But by the 1850s, and even more so by the 1890s,
a gap had opened between the poor and the working class on one hand
and the middle class and the rich on the other. Around Carnegie's
Homestead plant near Pittsburgh lay thousands of workers' shacks.
Employees worked every day of the year except Christmas and the Fourth
of July, often for twelve hours a day. In crowded Manhattan, the first
(and sometimes the last) stopping point for millions of European
immigrants, many lived in the infamous "dumbbell" tenements: five- or
six-story buildings with four families and two toilets on each floor.
Yet in every large city these slums existed within walking distance of
the mansions of the well-to-do. Some maintained the contrast was a
disgrace to the economic system that produced it; others held that it
was a natural result of competition and the "survival of the fittest."
Social Darwinism and the Gospel of Wealth provided both comfort and
justification for those who enjoyed the fruits of industrialism in
America."
From "Industrial America." The United States in World History.
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111str4.html
=====
"What, then, does it mean to exploit workers? How did the captains of
industry actually exploit their workers?
"In the first place, workers were not compelled or forced by
businessmen to take jobs in factories. This point is important. For
the first time in history, the laboring classes could, on the whole,
choose the kind of work they wanted to do, they could choose where
they wanted to work, and they could choose for whom they wanted to
work. This new sense of liberation freed young men and women from
either the drudgery of life on a farm or from a stratified society
based on a fixed, unchanging hierarchy of status relations."
"Under the system of unregulated laissez-faire, every individual had
the right to sell his or her labor/skills in exchange for a fair wage.
Unlike the feudal system, the worker was not restricted by family, by
guild or by baron as to whom or as to where he may seek employment. On
the basis of a free and voluntary contract, the employer agreed to pay
a wage salary in exchange for the employee's labor and know-how."
"In this free-market environment, wages were determined by the law of
supply and demand. Employers competed with one another for the
services of workers. An employer who underpaid his workers would
frequently lose them to those who paid a higher wage."
From "On Defending the Indefensible, Part Two," by C. Bradley
Thompson. On Principle, v2n3 (1994) Ashbrook Center for Public
Affairs.
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v2n3/thompson.html
The following policies affected European Immigrants during the latter
part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century
********************************************************************************
1875 Supreme Court declared that regulation of immigration is the
responsibility of the Federal Government.
1882 Act A general Immigration Act which levied a 50 cents head tax on
each immigrant and blocked the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts,
beggars, anarchists and those having contagious diseases, thereby
excluding anyone likely to become a public charge.
1885 and 1887 Alien Contract Labor laws which prohibited certain
laborers from immigrating to the United States.
1891 The Federal Government assumed the task of inspecting, admitting,
rejecting, and processing all immigrants seeking admission to the U.S.
1892 On January 2, a new Federal immigration station opened on Ellis
Island in New York Harbor.
From "Significant Historic Dates Affecting U.S. Immigration." U.S.
Immigration History.
RapidImmigration.com
http://www.rapidimmigration.com/usa/1_eng_immigration_history.html
1929, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which set an annual
quota of 150,000 immigrants, only 30 percent of which could come from
southern and eastern Europe.
1952 President Harry Truman signed the McCarran-Walter Act, which
revised the National Origins Act. People of all races would now be
eligible for immigration into the United States. However, under this
law, ideology became a criterion for admission. Both immigrants' and
citizens' political beliefs were questioned during the "Red scare" of
the 1950s, as the government sought to weed out people with even a
marginally communist background. The McCarran-Walter Act was
overturned in 1990 when Congress made it illegal for the U.S.
government to deny people entry because of their beliefs, statements,
or associations.
1965 The Immigration Act abolished quotas that discriminated against
nationalities, substituting an overall limit of 170,000 immigrants
from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 immigrants from the Western
Hemisphere.
From "Overview of U.S. Immigration Policy." Close Up Foundation
(7/1998)
http://www.closeup.org/immigrat.htm#overview
=====
Were immigrants unduly discriminated against?
Does the U.S. Government still foster discrimination against
immigrants?
************************************************************************
The following excerpts are from:
"Policies Born of Racism and Xenophobia." Immigration in the United
States. (author anonymous)
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/digdir/students/agraber/research.html
Be aware that the article is somewhat biased!!!!
"no group has ever been as universally and continually victimized as
immigrants to America. From the beginning of its conception, the
national government of the United States has allowed racism and
xenophobia to shape its legislation regarding the admittance and
naturalization of foreign-born persons to the United States."
The author highlights the various laws that have been enacted to curb
the flow of immigrants to the United States, starting with the
Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that the United States would
freely grant citizenship to any immigrant that was "a free white
person." Of course, the Naturalization Act was certainly pointed
toward black people, but the author stresses the importance of
naturalism, or citizenship, that is still a common denominator for
today's immigrant population.
In the author's view, although the Act only addressed naturalization,
"immigration and naturalization have always been closely, if not
identically managed by the national government, and are concepts so
interrelated as to become nearly inseparable."
It is the author's opinion that the United States government still
fosters undue discrimination against immigrants by making it extremely
hard to obtain naturalization as a U.S. citizen.
"To be denied the full rights and recognition that stem from being a
citizen of the country in which one resides due to an insubstantial
and irrelevant quality, such as race, dehumanizes a person (Liptak).
While citizens may enjoy full protection from the government of their
constitutional rights and full public acknowledgement of their
rightful place in a civilized society, those specifically denied
naturalization possess neither insurance of dignity and happiness.
From both of these points, one can reasonably infer that one of the
primary purposes of the First Congress in creating the Naturalization
Act of 1790 was to discourage immigration to the United States by
non-white persons."
*****
"While the Fourteenth Amendment later granted citizenship to
African-Americans in the mid-1800s, immigrants of other nationalities,
continued to be discriminated against through federal immigration
policy for nearly 100 years after the Civil War."
*****
Congress implemented a discriminatory policy toward the European
immigrants with the passing of the Reed-Johnson Act of 1924. A quota
system was enacted to monitor the number of immigrants allowed into
the United States from particular countries. In essence, the United
States set up its own system of "preference" toward particular groups
of people.
"The quotas were used to discriminate against immigrants from eastern
and southern Europe and Asia. The quotas set the limits at "2% per
year of each nationality already residing in the U.S., using figures
from the 1890 census" (Tichenor 145). By 1924, the 1890 census was
extremely outdated, not taking into account the 800,000 European
immigrants who arrived in 1920, mainly from eastern and southern
Europe. Using the 1890 figures, Congress estimated that 84% of
immigrants to the United States would arrive from the more desirable
locations of northern and western Europe, leaving only 16% from
eastern and southern Europe.
Support for enactment of the Reed-Johnson Act stemmed primarily from
the "Red Scare" induced by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Americans
were alarmed by the "radicalism" induced by the Revolution, and the
consequences that might entail by allowing potential ethnic
"subversives" into the United States.
"Studies by the Dillingham Commission, a committee appointed by the
Senate to investigate immigrants from eastern and southern Europe,
indicated that such immigrants were less likely to assimilate into
American society, an idea intolerable to the people of the United
States. Americans assumed that those unable to incorporate themselves
into America remained defiantly ethnic in the hopes of subverting
American culture. The pseudo-science of eugenics, or improving human
race through the maintenance of racial purity, dominated American
immigration politics.
*****
"For example, the Dillingham Commission found that Italians were
"racially prone to crime." (Liptak).
*****
"In 1923, the Eugenics Research Association investigated and reported
the genetic inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans compared to
their northern and western counterparts (Tichenor 143). Physical,
mental, and emotional differences between Americans and immigrants,
whether actual or perceived, became the basis of the scientific
rationalizations of xenophobic legislation in America in the 1920s."
(for the footnote references, refer to the Essay Bibliography)
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/digdir/students/agraber/bibliography.html
====
Additional Information
**********************
Read "U.S. Immigration Policy." Close Up Foundation (1998)
http://www.closeup.org/immigrat.htm#overview
(Provides an excellent overview of immigration policies up to the
present)
=====
This is an extensive subject. However, I tried to work within the
parameters of your question. If I can clarify anything further, please
don't hesitate to ask *before* rating this answer. I will be happy to
help.
umiat-ga
first european immigrants AND US policies
early policies against European immigrants 1860-1900
laissez-faire and New immigrants |
