Immigrants 2
Immigrants 2In 1886 the statue of "Liberty Enlightening the World," a gift from
the people of France, was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland. Set at
the entrance to New York, the statue was just in time to greet the biggest
migration in global history. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, invites the rest of the world to �give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.�
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, a time period known as the Progressive era, there were massive waves of immigration to America. More than a million immigrants arrived in each of the years 1905, 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913, and 1914. Totaling over 23 million immigrants to America between the years 1880 and 1921. These new immigrants were largely Italians, Hungarians, Jews, Serbians, Irish, and Slovaks. Other small, but notable groups included French Canadians, Chinese, and Japanese. This so called "new immigration" was different in many other ways from previous immigration. Until 1897, 90 percent of all overseas immigrants had come from Protestant northern and western Europe. But for the first time, Catholic and Jewish immigrants outnumbered Protestants, and still other arrivals were Muslims, Buddhists, or Greek or Russian Orthodox church members.
Fleeing such hardships as poverty, religious persecution, and political unrest in their homelands, immigrants journeyed to the United States in search of freedom and opportunity. The immigrants came partly because Europe seemed to be running out of room. The population of the Old World more than doubled in the nineteenth century, and Europe began to generate a seething pool of apparently "Surplus" people. They were displaced and footloose in their homelands before they felt the tug of the American magnet. However, most of the immigrants came to the United States for economic reasons. In the late 1800�s, the agriculturally based economies of many European towns declined as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Farmers and local craftspeople often could not compete with the technology and the mass production of the cities. Many of these farming families lived on tiny plots of land that barely provided the foodstuffs they needed to survive. As a result, more people competed for fewer resources, such as land, food, and jobs.
Another common reason for emigration was Political and Religious Persecution in Eastern Europe. Many of these eastern Europeans, the majority Jewish, lived in a Russian-controlled region known as the Jewish Pale of settlement. Russian law forbade Jews from owning and renting land, and excluded them from attending secondary schools and universities. In addition, the Russian government supported violent mob attacks against Jews known as pogroms. During pogroms, Jews were beaten, murdered, raped, and had their homes looted or destroyed....
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