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Immigration to the United States

The United States of America has had a long history of immigration, from the first Spanish and English settlers to arrive on the shores of the country to the waves of immigration from Europe in the 19th century to immigration in the present day. Throughout American history immigration has caused controversy.

The history of immigration to the United States of America is, in some senses, the history of the United States itself and the journey from beyond the sea is an essential element of the American myth, appearing over and over again in everything from The Godfather to "The Song of Myself " to Neil Diamond's "America" to the animated feature An American Tail.

Contents

Historical immigration

Colonial-era immigration to North America

Early immigration laws prevented Asians and Africans from entering the USA legally (except as chattels in the latter case). For most Europeans, however, immigration was relatively free and unrestricted until the 1800s and the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Voluntary migration from Europe

The population of the colonies that later became the United States grew from zero Europeans in the mid-1500s to 3.2 million Europeans and 700,000 African slaves in 1790. At that time, it is estimated that 3/4 of the population were of British descent with Germans forming the second-largest free ethnic group and making up some 7% of the population.

Between 1629 and 1640 some 20,000 Puritans emigrated from England, most settling in the New England area of North America. In an event known as the Great Migration, these people became the Yankees of far north New England, who later spread out to New York and the Upper Midwest.

From 1609 to 1664, some 8,000 Dutch settlers peopled the New Netherlands, which later became New York and New Jersey.

Between 1645 and 1670, some 45,000 Royalists and/or indentured servants left England to work in the Middle Colonies and Virginia

From about 1675 to 1715, the Quakers made their move, leaving the Midlands and North England behind for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. The Quaker movement became one of the largest religious presences in early colonial America.

Germans migrated early into several colonies but mostly to Pennsylvania, where they made up a third of the population by the time of the Revolution.

Between about 1710 and 1775, around 250,000 Scotch-Irish left Ulster (the northern province of Ireland) and settled in western Pennsylvania, Appalachia and the western frontier: these places later would become Kentucky and Tennessee.

Unfree labor: Slavery, indentured servitude and convict shipments

The majority of African slaves came to the future United States before it gained independence. The numbers remain less than clear, but it is believed that some 300,000 slaves arrived in the States before Independence, and some 100,000 were imported in the period between the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. The slave trade was outlawed in 1808, upon the expiration of a constitutional clause prohibiting such a law (Article 1, section 9).

And while history tends to emphasize the British shipment of convicts to its Australian colony, between 1700 and 1770, some 50,000 European convicts were also crossed the seas to North America in an earlier penal transportation system.

About 1.8 million Irish immigrated to North American during the Great Potato Famine
Enlarge
About 1.8 million Irish immigrated to North American during the Great Potato Famine

Immigration 1776 to 1849

Germans made up almost one-tenth of the population of the country by the end of the 18th century. At least 500,000 Germans immigrated in the first half of the 19th century. 20,000 came in the years 1816-1817, fleeing a famine. Some 60,000 fled to America after the failed Revolutions of 1848.

Immigration 1850 to 1930

The 1850 United States census was the first federal U.S. census to query about the "nativity" of citizens—where they were born, either in the United States or outside of it—and is thus the first point at which solid statistics become available.

Between 1850 and 1930 about 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States with a peak in the years between 1881 and 1885, when a million Germans left Germany and settled mostly in the Midwest.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French Canadians left Canada to emigrate to the United States and settled mainly in New England. Given the French-Canadian population at the time, this was a massive exodus. 13.6 million Americans claimed to have French ancestry in the 1980 census. Indeed, a large proportion of them have ancestors who emigrated from French Canada.

The years 1910 to 1920 were the highpoint of Italian immigration to the United States. Over 2 million Italians immigrated in those few years of a total of 5.3 million who immigrated between 1820 and 1980.

Many Jews who tried to flee Nazi Germany were denied access to the United States, highlighted by the tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis , The Tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis.

Laws concerning immigration

A series of measures attempting to control the demographic makeup of the United States was enacted from 1892 forward. On May 19, 1921, for example, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census. A more complex quota plan replaced this "emergency" system under the Immigration Act of 1924. One major change was that the reference census used was changed to that of 1890, which greatly reduced the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Immigrants from most of the Western Hemisphere, however, were admitted outside the quota system.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) revised the quotas again. This law based its quotas on the 1920 census. Nevertheless, most of the quota allocation still went to immigrants from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany.

The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (the Hart-Cellar Act) abolished the system of national-origin quotas. There was for the first time a limitation on Western Hemisphere immigration (120,000 per year), with the Eastern Hemisphere limited to 170,000. Most of these numbers were allocated to immigrants who were relatives of United States citizens.

Several pieces of legislation signed into law in 1996 marked a turn towards harsher policies for both legal and undocumented immigrants. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act vastly increased the categories of criminal activity for which immigrants, including green-card holders, can be deported and imposed mandatory detention for certain types of deportation cases. As a result, well over 1,000,000 individuals have been deported since 1996.

See also: List of United States Immigration Acts

Contemporary immigration

Contemporary immigrants settle very predominantly in six states: California, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey and Illinois. The combined total immigrant population of these six states formed 70% of the total foreign-born population as of 2000.

Illegal Immigration

One consequence of laws restricting the number and ethnicity of persons entering the USA is a phenomenon referred to as illegal immigration, in which persons enter a country and obtain work without legal sanction. In some cases, this is accomplished by entering the country legally with a visa, and then simply choosing not to leave upon expiration of the visa. In other cases - most notoriously Mexicans in the USA without legal sanction - people enter the country surreptitiously without ever obtaining a visa. Often, people entering in this fashion are economic refugees - a class of refugee not recognized by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration_Services (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service); these persons have left their home country in a desperate bid to provide financial support for themselves and/or their families. This is particularly true in cases where "minimum wage" in the US is several times what the average laborer earns in a given country; such immigrants often send large portions of their income to their countries and families of origin.

Much of the controversy today with immigration to the US involves anti-illegal immigration ideologies. Critics of these ideologies say that those who call for an end to "illegal immigration" really advocate an end to all immigration, but do not realize it. This occurs for two reasons:

  1. All the problems associated illegal immigration (race to the bottom in wages, etc.) also apply almost equally to legal immigrants.
  2. Anti-immigrant ideologues allegedly misunderstand the immigration process and do not realize that many immigrant workers - who they see as replacing American citizens in jobs they can do - have immigrated completely legally, albeit without citizenship (this number exceeds the number of illegal immigrants on a per-country basis).

At the dawn of the 21st century, the controversy revived when many high-tech and software-engineering workers started to arrive from India on "H1" visas. Critics claimed that these people worked for less money and displaced American citizens. The companies who imported the workers usually argued that the US lacked enough American citizens to do the work. A few economists argued that, whatever the truth of that assertion, importing the workers provided more benefits to the US, and otherwise the recruiting companies would simply offshore the entire operation to India itself. This would likely prove worse for the US economy as a whole, because in the first scenario Indian workers living in the United States would at least spend money in the United States, while the supranational corporations that would purportedly export the jobs to India would probably not pass down as much of the savings to the US consumer who purchased for them.

Political asylum

In contrast to economic refugees, who generally do not gain legal admission, other classes of refugees can gain legal status through a process of seeking and receiving political asylum, either by entering as asylees or by entering illegally and receiving asylee status thereafter. For the most part, such persons are fleeing warfare; escaping persecution based on political or religious beliefs; or are victims of torture in their countries of origin. Some asylum cases have been also granted based on sexual orientation or gender, where cultural norms of the home country create and sustain conditions that make life unsafe or unbearable for the individual. As of 2004, recipients of political asylum faced a wait of 14 years to receive permanent resident status after receiving their initial asylee status, because of an annual cap of 10,000 green cards for this class of individuals.

See also

External links


Last updated: 12-29-2004 16:30:31