Coming to America Pt. 2: Early Frontier, Native Fears, and the Golden Years of Open Immigration.
1820–1880s: Who’s Immigrating During This Period?
Approximately, 80% of the immigrants to the United States between the 1820s and 1880s came from Northern Europe (Scandinavia, British Isles, and Germany).[2] The religious persecution of the Catholic Irish by the British Protestants in the 1820s, which was further exacerbated by the Irish potato famine (1845–1849), sent many Irish packing for America. In Germany, political upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars spurred many Germans to emigrate. Italian immigration begins to increase at the end of this period, though the significant increase from Italy and other southern European countries doesn’t come until the turn of the century. During this period, Chinese laborers also are immigrating, primarily to the western United States, drawn by Gold Rush boomtowns and railroad construction in the western frontier.
From the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 until 1819, it’s estimated that between 125,000–250,000 people immigrated to the United States.[3] From 1820–1880 a massive increase of over 10 million people entered during this time, an influx averaging out to over 166,000 immigrants per year. The immigration boom was allowed to occur since virtually no barriers to immigration existed in the United States during this period. 70% of the immigration during this period, comes through New York City. Prior to 1892, immigrants lined up for hours at Castle Garden, an immigration center run by the state of New York, where they were screened for disease and known criminality before being registered and allowed entry. In 1890, the immigration process becomes the responsibility of the federal government, which relocated the entry point to Ellis Island in 1892.
Pushing and Pulling for Immigration
Over the course of the 19th century, the rapidly increasing international migration was also significantly driven by changing economic conditions in Europe. As industrialization ramped up in Europe, the shift from the old feudal production structure left many landless peasants seeking labor options. Industrialization moved the production of goods, previously produced by tradespeople, into factories. The process displaced many artisans and sent them looking for opportunities in the New World.[4][5]Concurrently, in America, the desperate need for labor in virtually all areas of production (railroads, factories, mines, etc.) made large-scale immigration appealing to many, particularly industrialists. By 1870, one out of every three laborers in the manufacturing and mechanical industry was an immigrant.[6]Along with facilitating the growth of American industrialization, the influx of skilled and unskilled labor also expanded national borders as immigrants flooded into American cities and pushed further into the interior to settle farms.[7] In short, immigration allowed for American economic and geographic expansion.
Social scientists talk about these impetuses for immigration by grouping them into “push” or “pull” factors. A “push” factor is something that spurs an immigrant to leave their home country. Deteriorating economic conditions, religious persecution, political or military conflicts are all examples of pushes. In contrast, a “pull factor” is what attracts an immigrant to their destination country. Greater economic opportunity, social freedom, and political stability are all examples of pulls. In studying immigration patterns through time, it becomes increasingly evident how important push and pull factors are to the movement of people groups from one location to another.
A Period Not Without Its Problems
Though marked by open immigration, it would be inaccurate to characterize this era of American history as a utopia where new immigrants were seamlessly integrated into the culture and accepted. The Chinese immigrants of the 1850s-1870s were vilified as cheap laborers stealing jobs and beggaring the American workingman. As a result, they contended with lynching and boycotts of their businesses.
Many natives also despised the Irish due to their Catholicism and stereotype as violent drunks. These prejudices led to the formation of the “Know-Nothing Party” in 1844 (later to become known as the “American” party in 1854). Widely considered the first popular and marginally successful nativist party, the Know-Nothings benefitted from forming as the Whig party disintegrated. Coalescing around a fear that Irish Catholics are overwhelming American cities, their political platform aimed to address this concern through various policies. They proposed severe limits on immigration especially from Catholic countries, restricting public office to native-born Americans, mandating a wait of 21 years for citizenship, requiring all public-school teachers to be Protestant along with daily Bible reading, and restricting liquor sales. The party proved to be relatively short-lived and ineffectual on a policy level. It would later split over slavery in the late 1850s with the anti-slavery faction being absorbed into the Republican party.
A Heritage and Hope for the Future
Despite the anti-immigration sentiments prevalent in this period, it still allowed for a significant increase in immigration. While smooth integration into the existing American social or economic system has never been easy for newly arrived immigrants, the 1820s-1880s demonstrate that there have been historical periods that have contended with contentious immigration without immediately defaulting to restrictive policy. The American heritage originated in an open society where immigrants had the freedom to come and participate in writing the American story, albeit in the face of adversity. Was it a utopia? No. But this is a period defined by people groups from across the globe overcoming obstacles and making their way to share in the great American experiment. The commitment of these people groups to help build a young nation’s infrastructure, cities, and industry, all while contending with entrenched opposition, embodies the essence of the American spirit. That commitment to hard work and enduring hardship, that’s the American legacy, and immigrants do not just inherit this legacy throughout history. They define it. The encapsulation of the American story is that it’s an interwoven tale of millions who came to make a home for themselves in a new land and helped make the nation we all inhabit today.
1800s to 2021: A Tale of Two Different Lines
It’s critical to pause here and take a moment to juxtapose the process of immigration taking place in Castle Garden and Ellis Island in the 1800s with the current immigration system involving months or years-long waits for visa applications at embassies across the world. A lot of us with family that immigrated during this period are proud of the hardships that our ancestors overcame to start anew in America, and we should be proud. Yet, I often hear something like this in conversations, “My family came over in 1874. They waited their turn. They didn’t have anything handed to them. They did it the right way.” And I think that we like these statements because they give us a sense of legitimacy and superiority about our migratory heritage. Our ancestors did it. Why can’t today’s immigrants? However, that pride in our family’s bravery and success should not delude us into imagining that immigration access in 2021 is in any way comparable to access in the mid-1800s.
The hypothetical “line” of people waiting to immigrate is far longer today, and while transportation has allowed distances to be traversed exponentially faster than in the 1800s the modern administrative immigration system is a sprawling behemoth of paperwork, checks, regulations, and politics that all serve to slow the immigration process. In sharp contrast, while the entry inspection changed a bit over the 1800s it still remained fairly simply. No visa required. Immigrants could quite literally just walk off the boat, wait in line, and get screened for communicable diseases, known links to radical political groups, and likelihood of becoming a public charge. If the inspector thought you were clear, you gained entry. Compare this to our modern system with quotas, preference categories, and visas, and it quickly becomes evident that immigration in the 21st century is a whole different animal. For example, an Indian individual seeking an EB2 visa, an employment-based visa for immigrants with advanced degrees and exceptional abilities, is in for the disappointing reality check that applications are just now being processed for June of 2011. A Mexican individual attempting to obtain an F1 visa, a family-based visa for unmarried children of U.S. Citizens, faces the even grimmer reality that the United States Immigration and Immigration Service (USCIS) is just now processing applications from 1999.
The questions that I want to consider and I would ask you to consider with me is “Should your ability to immigrate be largely a result of when in history you were born? For those of us from families that benefited from open immigration over a century ago, are we comfortable with the idea of a more restrictive process that would deny immigration opportunities to families or individuals that are currently seeking to immigrate?” If so, why?
The idea that the policy options available are an increasingly restrictive and complex immigration process or complete anarchy is a false dichotomy. A better characterization would be that there is a spectrum of policies that balance concerns about national security, economic impacts, and immigration access. Detailed policy analysis and empirical social science are required to sort through which policies most efficiently produce the specific outcomes that the populace and our representatives have decided on, and there are scholars doing great work in these fields.
I, however, would argue that if we as a country are going to settle on telling hundreds of thousands of people to “Get in line, and wait their turn.” We ought to at least personally reflect on the complexity of the line that we are telling them to get in and whether we would have wanted our ancestors to have to wait in it.
References Used:
[2] Lemay, M. Guarding the Gates. (2006). p. 14
[3] Lemay, M. Guarding the Gates . (2006). p.14
[4] Irwin, D. Clashing over Commerce. (2017)
[5] Kim, S. Immigration, Industrial Revolution and Urban Growth in the United States, 1820–1920:Factor Endowments, Technology and Geography (2007). P. 5
[6] Llosa, A. Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America. (2013). p.5
[7] Walton, G. & Rockoff, H. History of the American Economy, 13th edition, p.178
