SECTION 1: The New Immigrants
◄ Two young Polish women at Ellis Island around 1910
WITNESS HISTORY 
AUDIO
Looking Forward and Back
Life was difficult for many immigrants in the United States during the late 1800s, but it also offered freedoms they had never known in their homelands.
“Not the looking forward made me go, but the looking backward made me search a new life and struggle a hard battle…. [I]t is hard still now to bear the homesickness, loneliness, among strange people not knowing the language doing hard [work] without a minute of joy. But when I look back into my childhood …, always under a terrible fear … I think that there is not anything harder. … America means for an Immigrant a fairy promised land that came out true, a land that gives all they need for their work, a land which gives them human rights, a land that gives morality through her churches and education through her free schools and libraries.”
—young Russian Jewish woman
Objectives
- Compare the “new immigration” of the late 1800s to earlier immigration.
- Explain the push and pull factors leading immigrants to America.
- Describe the challenges that immigrants faced in traveling to America.
- Analyze how immigrants adapted to American life while trying to maintain familiar cultural practices.
Terms and People
- “new” immigrant
- steerage
- Ellis Island
- Angel Island
- Americanization
- “melting pot”
- nativism
- Chinese Exclusion Act
NoteTaking
Reading Skill: Identify Main Ideas Record the main ideas of each section in an outline.
- New Immigrants Come to America
- Immigrants Decide to Leave Home
Why It Matters Immigration has been a central theme in American history. However, when the foreign-born population of the United States nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900, some Americans feared that the newcomers would destroy American culture. Instead, Americans adopted parts of immigrant cultures, while immigrants adopted parts of American culture. Section Focus Question: Why did immigrants come to the United States, and what impact did they have upon society?
New Immigrants Come to America
Immigrants had always come to America for economic opportunity and religious freedom. Until the 1870s, the majority had been Protestants from northern and western Europe. They came as families to settle in the United States, often on farms with family or friends who had come before. Many had saved some money for the journey, had a skill or trade, or were educated.
Many German and Irish Catholics had immigrated in the 1840s and 1850s, and more arrived after the Civil War. Some Americans had prejudices against Catholics, but the Irish spoke English and the German Catholics benefited from the good reputation of their Protestant countrymen. Although they lacked skills and money, the children of these immigrants were often able to blend into American society. Beginning in the 1870s, Irish and Germans were joined by “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. They arrived in increasing numbers until the outbreak of World War I.
Table of Contents