Migration DBQ The United States of America has, and will always be, a country where immigrants and refugees can migrate to, internally and internationally, to vastly improve their lives. During the late 19th century in the US, there was a massive influx of immigrants from all over the world, as well as movement of people already living in the US to different areas. These people were primarily seeking better job opportunities due to numerous economic issues in foreign countries and social tensions in the post-Reconstruction US.
In 1808, the United States banned the importation of slaves. In 1853, the US Customs and Border Patrol Agency was established In 1855, an immigration landing depot opened at Castle Garden. Before it's close in 1890, 34 million people entered the United States through Castle Garden.
In the 19th century we have seen the rise of the industrial revolution, this led to the construction of urban cities and urban life. Many immigrants were seen migrating to the United States in search of jobs opportunities and a better life. Most of the immigrants were Europeans. All the people working together in industries were of different cultures and were supposed to live in the same urban communities. Kasson writes that, they would not talk to each other and a sense of racial tension could be seen in the urban cities.
Immigrants have been dreaming about the promise of America for hundreds of years, but only the people who are brave enough have continued on coming to become a true American. Many different ethnicities have traveled into America to live their American dream, which is to have a job, house, a family of their own, and to have Freedom. Many people could either travel by train or boat. The poem “The New Colossus 1883” by Emma Lazarus tells a main idea of the Statue of Liberty represents freedom for many immigrants.
The United States had many economic problems after becoming a country, and as many other countries looked overseas for solutions. When America gained independence it was flooded with immigrants, urbanizing the cities and creating many changes. One change is that manufacturing became more common and soon it was making more money than agriculture. But Britain, Germany, and several other powers put a tax on imported manufactured goods in an attempt to preserve their own factories. So the US just started looking to lesser developed countries such as China to sell them.
America had always been a land of immigrants. Most of them started to come to the United States in early 19th centuries from Ireland and Germany, and some other countries. A lot of European immigrants arrived in the USA through New York. For a lot of European immigrants, the decision to move to the USA was because Europe by that time was too crowded and did not have enough room for so many people. In the beginning of nineteen centuries, the population of the United States more than doubled and reached 10 million people.
But this is not a new story. My own great-grandparents left Russia and eastern Europe for the US around the beginning of the 20th century. Jews didn’t have an easy time in tsarist Russia and, certainly by contemporary standards, they were a persecuted, oppressed minority. Equally, it would be naive to think that they weren’t in large part motivated by the desire to build a better, more prosperous life in the US. The same is probably true for many of today’s migrants: both push and pull factors are at
Beginning in the early 1800’s, until war was declared in World War I, millions of immigrants arrived in the United States from Russia, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Britain and Ireland. Their labor helped feed the American economy and aided the geographic expansion of the country. During this period under the Naturalization Act of 1790, the U.S. borders were open with no limits on immigration. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned the employment of Chinese workers, marking the first attempt to regulate foreign labor. With the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, thousands upon thousands of migrant workers from Mexico began arriving in the United States.
The Irish immigrants were a large percentage of London in the nineteenth century and the greatest flow of their migration came in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This was due to the agricultural problems, the increase of demand for Irish labor in the Industrial revolution, and the bad conditions in Ireland due to the Great Famine (Clive). London was the largest city in the world and the Irish made up the largest immigrant group during this time. In 1841, the first census to record those living in the city was taken and 4% of the population was the Irish. They grew again in 1851 due to the Great Famine.
The 2016 US election will be an election that no person will forget, especially the fallout after the results for the president-elect were announced. Protests and riots breaking out denying the reality that Trump had won and many threats by some Pro-Trump saying inappropriate racial slurs and many telling non whites to ‘get out of their town/city or else.’ Throughout the years, the United States has been called the land of opportunity, leading to a high immigration rate in the late 1800s. Many foreigners came to the US feeling they would be accepted and allowed a new life. The reality being that they were received poorly and had mountiful acts of racism, both within the law and the populace, thrown upon them.
Your analysis is most agreeable. Although the gilded age was the era of huge technological advancements, it was certainly not a pleasant time for all of the people who lived in America. It was not only the native Americans who were not in their best condition from a political and economical aspect, but the immigrants were suffering to some extent too. Unlike the Native Americans that were forced out of their homes, the immigrants had their decision made for them; they lived in tenements, because of their financial situations. Also, often times, immigrants did not have many career options, since most of them were uneducated and were struggling with the language, so they worked in railroads and mines that sometimes belonged to the Natives.
Most immigrants who came to the U.S had high expectations that they would find wealth but once they arrived they realized their expectations weren’t what they expected. Although, they were disappointed in not finding wealth the conditions in which the U.S was in by the late 1800s were still a lot better than the places they all had left behind to come. The majority of the immigration population anticipation was to find profitable jobs and opportunities. When the large numbers of immigration were migrating to the U.S, it was during the “Gilded Age”, which was the prime time for the country’s expansion of industrialization. This rapid expansion of new industries led to the need of workers which motivated people from other countries to come to
The migration of immigrants back then, were mainly because they wanted to find a better work experience. Some would even move to seek a new and improved religion. In the 1800-1880s, one of the main reasons immigrants moved, was because of the rising of taxes in their area which made them want to escape from that. Today, in modern day America, we still move in search for better jobs. Because the world has changed in so many ways, we constantly move, however, one of the main reasons is because of natural disasters that may have occurred in a particular area, which causes groups of families to move out of their old homes into a new location.
Americans had rarely accepted outsiders as equals, and that was the case with immigrants coming to the U.S in the 1840s to the 1920s. A time in America where immigrants were not considered inferior to native white Americans did not exist. The hatred of anything non-American, especially with the coming of World War I in 1914, would only cause more Americans to despise immigrants. Part of this was rooted simply in racism, which existed towards groups other than African Americans, but much of it was simply that Americans considered themselves the chosen people while everyone else was below them. Thus, despite immigrants being accepted into America, those immigrants were still treated far worse than white citizens between the 1840s and 1920s, for the prejudice against them was obvious even in the laws created.
20th Century Migration: Escaping Economic Poverty and Political Violence The United States has had a historical background of colonizations and liberations in which caused many foreign Europeans to clash for more power by extracting valuable resources. It seems to be more clear as to what the United States wanted to accomplish through their constant involvement with their neighboring Central American countries and Mexico. The U.S. has searched for different ways to extract the goods of nations and to send them back to boost their own economy. At this point, we can already make the assumption that the U.S. was more interested in the wealth and goods of Central America rather than the actual nation they are involved with.
