European immigration to the United States: 1892-1943
European immigration to the United States between 1892 and 1943 marks a significant period characterized by changing demographics, challenges, and evolving policies. Following the opening of Ellis Island in 1892 as the first federal immigration station, a large influx of immigrants, particularly from southern and eastern Europe, began to reshape the societal landscape. Initially, the majority of immigrants hailed from northern and western Europe, but by 1907, nearly 81% originated from Mediterranean and Slavic countries, driven largely by economic hardship and political strife in their home nations.
The transportation revolution, especially the advent of steamships, facilitated easier and faster travel to America, making it an attractive destination for many seeking better opportunities. However, this period also saw rising nativist sentiments and the enactment of restrictive immigration laws, such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas favoring earlier immigrant groups and limiting those from southern and eastern Europe.
Despite initial fears regarding their integration and impact, many of these immigrants ultimately became an integral part of American society, disproving stereotypes of permanent poverty and isolation. By the 1940s, as World War II loomed, the complexities surrounding immigration shifted again, laying the groundwork for future reforms and the eventual reevaluation of policies affecting newcomers from diverse backgrounds.
European immigration to the United States: 1892-1943
Significance: A new wave of Southern European immigrants met with nativist resentment and federal controls.
In 1808, the US government purchased Ellis Island from the state of New York for ten thousand dollars. The new federal property, located in New York Harbor about one mile from the southern tip of Manhattan Island, served first as a fort and later as an arsenal. Until 1882, the state of New York had guided the influx of immigration from the old Castle Garden station at the tip of Manhattan. The opening of Ellis Island on January 1, 1892, as the first federal immigration station symbolized a new era for the United States as well as the beginning of the end of free immigration to the New World.
Congress had begun the selective process of excluding undesirable elements among those emigrating to the United States with the passage of the federal Immigration Act in 1882. That measure was designed to prevent the immigration of persons who had criminal records and those who were mentally incompetent or indigent. That same year, Congress also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (later extended to all Asians), barring an entire nationality from entry as racially undesirable for a period of ten years. In 1904 the act’s provisions were extended indefinitely, to be repealed only in 1943.
Immigration Patterns Shift
Most immigrants before the 1890s had come from northern and western Europe. In the 1880s a fundamental change occurred. In addition to the traditional immigrants, who shared common language patterns with persons already in the United States, people from Mediterranean and Slavic countries began to arrive in increasing numbers. One may measure the change more dramatically by comparing two peak years in US immigration. In 1882, 87 percent of the 788,000 immigrants came from northern and western Europe. In 1907, only 19.3 percent were from northern and western Europe, while 80.7 percent came from southern and eastern Europe.
A great impetus to immigration was the transportation revolution engendered by the steamship. In 1856, more than 96 percent of US immigrants came aboard sailing ships, on trips that took between one and three months. By 1873, the same percentage came by steamships, which took only ten days. The new steamships were specifically designed for passengers, and while still subject to overcrowding and epidemics, they were a major improvement over the sailing ships. Steamship companies competed for immigrant business and maintained offices in Europe. The Hamburg-Amerika line, for example, had thirty-two hundred US agencies throughout Europe. More than half of the immigrants in 1901 came with prepaid tickets supplied by relatives in the United States.
As the older agricultural economy of Europe was replaced by an industrial one, many former farmers moved to European cities in search of employment; often unsuccessful in that search, they were easily persuaded to try the New World, where jobs were said to be plentiful. The same railroad-building process that opened the American West to the immigrant made it easier and cheaper for the Europeans to reach their coastal areas and embark for the United States.
Most of the emigration from southern Europe was occasioned by economic distress. Southern Italy’s agriculture was severely affected by competition from Florida in oranges and lemons, as well as by a French tariff against Italian wines. The Italian emigration began with 12,000 in 1880 and reached a peak of nearly 300,000 in 1914. After immigration restriction laws took full effect, Italian immigration fell to 6,203 in 1925.
From Russia and the Slavic areas, emigration was also caused by political and religious problems. Jews fled in reaction to the riots set off by the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1882, the pogroms of 1881–82 and 1891, and the 1905-1906 massacres of thousands of Jews. Jewish immigration to the United States began with 5,000 in 1880 and reached a peak of 258,000 in 1907. Some two million Roman Catholic Poles also arrived between 1890 and 1914. In 1925, however, the Immigration Service recorded only 5,341 entrants from Poland and 3,121 from Russia and the Baltic States.
Nativist Fears
Two issues caused the greatest concern to American nativists in the 1890s: the tendency of the new immigrants to congregate in the cities, and the fact that they spoke seemingly unassimilable languages. One of the first articulate spokesmen against unrestricted immigration, the Reverend Dr. Josiah Strong, was alarmed by the concentration of foreign peoples in cities. Strong’s famous book, Our Country, published in 1885, clearly stated what many other US citizens feared: that the new influx of immigrants would create permanent slums and perpetuate poverty.
The urban nature of the settlement was unavoidable. US agriculture was suffering from the same shocks that had disrupted European agriculture, and the populist movement in the country made clear that the myth of utopia in the western United States was no longer believable. Most of the new immigrants were attracted by the pull of US industry and opportunity, and they came to the United States with the express purpose of settling in a city. In addition, new industrial technology had reduced the demand for skilled labor, while the need for unskilled and cheap factory help increased. To add to the social clash between the new and old immigrants, the arrival of a new labor force in great numbers probably allowed some older laborers to move up to more important supervisory and executive positions.
Many new immigrants did not share the optimism and enthusiasm of established Americans. Some tended to be pessimistic and resigned, distrustful of change, and unfamiliar with democratic government after having lived in autocratic situations. At the height of the new immigration occurred the Panic of 1893, followed by a depression that lasted until 1897, which seemed to confirm the fears of persons already settled in the United States that the country and the system were failing. The new immigration, however, was but one of the major social, cultural, and economic changes taking place in the turbulent United States of the 1890s.
In 1907, Congress created the Dillingham Commission to investigate the problems of immigration. Many of the commission’s findings reflected the fears of citizens concerning the new immigration and led to the passage of restrictive legislation in the 1920s. Unrestricted immigration ended with the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which restricted immigrants in any year to 154,277. Each country’s quota could be no more than 2 percent of the number of its natives counted in the 1890 census, a year in which few born in southern and eastern Europe were part of the US population.
When Ellis Island closed as a reception center in 1943, few immigrants still arrived by ship, and the Immigration Service could handle all arrivals at Manhattan’s docks. When the Atlantic reopened after World War II, planes began to replace ships as vehicles of immigration, and there was no need for Ellis Island. By that time, much of the fear of the “new” immigration had evaporated. Italian, Slavs, and Jews had not remained in permanent slums, mired in perpetual poverty, as Strong had feared, and their descendants had fought side by side with US soldiers of British and German ancestry against the Nazis and the Japanese.
In the 1940s, there was much criticism of the rigidity of the immigration restriction legislation that hampered attempts to deal with the problems of refugees. Not until 1965, however, would the rigid quota system established in 1924 be replaced with a more flexible system. When that reform opened the door to increased entry by Asians and Latin Americans, complaints about the new “new immigrants” began to echo nineteenth century uneasiness about the former “new immigrants.”
Bibliography
Brownstone, David M., Irene M. Franck, and Douglas L. Brownstone, ed. Island of Hope, Island of Tears. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.
Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Print.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted. 2nd ed. Boston: Little, 1990. Print.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1955. Print.
Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.