Essay On African American Immigration

Francis Scott Key, in 1814, called America “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” and this motto was heard by people from other countries. These people decided to leave behind their old lives in order to escape their native countries for various reasons. Some of these reasons include overpopulation, unhappiness, and oppression. Immigrants risked everything to come to the United States of America in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, however immigrants experienced dangerous journeys, anti-immigrant ideas, and harsh experiences in US immigration stations.

Halfway through the nineteenth century, something called the “American Fever” “swept through nation after nation” (“Immigrants in Motion”).In the 1850’s “mass migrations” occurred

In Ireland a famine struck the farmers when a fungus caused “potato crops to rot,” this caused epidemics of disease to “spread from village to village” (“Immigration in US History). The Industrial Revolution “fueled the need for workers in the nation's flourishing factories” (“Immigration in US History”). Due to the large influx of immigrants “secret societies of white supremacists, such as the Ku Klux Klan, formed,” these groups not only opposed African American culture but Roman Catholicism and naturalization of immigrants too (“Immigration in US History”). In the 1880’s and 90’s many Eastern European immigrants arrived in the United States, many of them uneducated and unskilled. Many of these immigrants were also limited in their “ability to assimilate into the U.S. culture (“Immigration in US History”). When quotas were put in place to keep immigration under control, people started crossing the Mexican and Canadian

However, “Between 1892 and 1990, 650,252 people were denied entry for a variety of reasons”. But, the majority of immigrants were allowed access into America. People considered “likely to become public charges” weren’t allowed into the US. Paperwork was required to gain entrance (“Immigration in US History”). About ⅔ of immigrants passed through New York City. “Before state or federal regulations for arrival were in place, landing there was a confusing event” (“Immigration in Motion”). Non-english speakers were vulnerable to being overcharged for goods they didn’t necessarily need. In 1855 the regulation of immigrants began, “people were processed as they came into the country;” Castle Garden, a regulation station, was founded with the purpose to “prohibit entrance to the United States to people who had infectious diseases” (“Immigrants in Motion”). After Castle Garden became too overcrowded and unable to handle the mass immigration, the government turned Ellis Island into a regulation station too. “Of the average three to four thousand people who passed through Ellis Island each day, about 80 percent were admitted without delay,” the people who weren’t given admission were given free return passage. A sick child over the age of 12, if sick, could return home alone. However, if the child was under 12 years old, families were faced with the “very emotional decision about who was to go back with the