AMERICAN IMMIGRATION
1) Puritans
The Puritans were a group of religious reformers who
emerged within the Church of England during the middle
of the 16th century. They shared a common Calvinist
theology and common criticism of the Anglican Church
and English society and government.
● In both Britain and British North America Puritans
sought to cleanse the culture of what they regarded
as corrupt, sinful practices. They believed that the
civil government should strictly enforce public
morality by prohibiting vices like drunkenness,
gambling, ostentatious dress, swearing.
● They also wished to cleanse churches of every
Roman Catholic ritual and practice - the ruling
hierarchies of bishops and cardinals, the elaborate
ceremonies.
2) Doctrine of Predestination
According to the Puritan doctrine of predestination God
had a plan for all human history - that every event in the
lives of individuals and nations somehow tended towards
an ultimate triumph of good ever evil, order over
disorder, Christ over Satan.
Calvin and his followers saw human history as a cosmic
drama in which every person had a predestined role to
play. Men and women had no free will, but they had the
assurance that their existence was MEANINGFUL and
that their strivings and sufferings in the present would
ultimately produce a future of perfect peace and security
- a kind of heaven on earth.
Puritans were striving to reshape both society and
government to what they believed to be the will of God
as set in the Bible. The strove to lead godly and
discipline lives - but not to earn salvation
.
Instead, they believed that their ability to master their
evil inclinations provided some evidence that they ranked
among the elect of saints. In other words, the Puritans did
not regard leading a godly moral life as the CAUSE of a
person’s salvation, but rather as an encouraging sign of
the EFFECT of being chosen by God to enjoy eternal
bliss in heaven.
3) First Wave of immigration 1790 - 1820
● PUSH/PULL FACTORS: Groups of immigrants
came for a variety of religious, political and
economic reasons.
● IMMIGRANTS: English, Scots, Scots-Irish (asked
by the government to overcome Christianity),
German, Dutch, French, Spanish (migrated to
Florida and southwest for Christian converts),
Puritans (migrated to Massachusetts to establish a
community restricted to members of their faith)
● FACTS: Starvation, disease and shipwreck killed 1
in 10 of those immigrants.
4) Second Wave of Immigration 1820 - 1860
● PUSH/PULL FACTORS: Immigrants came for new
opportunities because, in Europe, peasants displaced
from agriculture and artisans were made jobless
from the industrial revolution. Some immigrants
received “American Letters” which were
encouraging friends and relatives to join them in
America.
● IMMIGRANTS: German (escaping economic
problems and seeking political freedom), British,
Irish (poverty and the Great Famine because of the
lack of potatoes - 50 % alone women because they
did not have daury)
● FACTS: The Roman Catholic Church was the single
largest religious body in USA by 1850. Steamships
and railroad companies recruited immigrants as
customers.
a) Migrants:
- The Germans - were mainly Protestants and
they were quickly assimilated into the general
pattern of American culture.
- The Irish - tried to escape from the poverty and
famine of their own country which in the 1840s
killed over a million people. They were almost
all Catholics, full of resentment at the
domination of their own home country by
English Protestant landlords. That’s why they
threatened the Protestant domination in
America and thus they met with some hostile
prejudice - NINA laws (No Irish Need Apply -
we do not need Irish workers).
b) Mass migration
● By the middle of the 19th century the USA,
with over 23 million inhabitants, had a larger
population than any single European country,
and by 1880 it reached 50 million.
● In the mid-1800s, thousands of Chinese
emigrated to California, where most of them
worked on the railroad.
● Gold Rush
5) Third Wave of Immigration 1880 - 1914
● PUSH/PULL FACTORS: Immigrants came over to
America for more job opportunities and freedom of
religion.
● IMMIGRANTS: Chinese (many males, their
females in China), Japanese and other Asian
countries (migrated to western states).
● FACTS: Over half of the operatives in steel,
meat-packing, and mining were made up of
immigrants.
6) The Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed which
suspended Chinese immigration for 10 years. This is
considered the first federal immigration act because
Congress finally states that immigration could be
regulated only on the federal level.
7) Ellis Island
From 1892 to 1954, over 12 million immigrants entered
the USA through the portal of Ellis Island, a small island
in New York Harbor. Ellis Island is located in the upper
bay just off the New Jersey coast, within the shadow of
the Statue of Liberty.
8) “Old” and “new” immigrants
A new wave of immigration started in the late 1800s and
the first decade of the 20th century. The new immigrants
were Latin, Slavic and Jewish people from southern and
eastern Europe. Among these new arrivals were Italians,
Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Rumanians and Greeks.
● The division into so-called “old” and “new”
immigrants appeared. These were people whose
languages, customs and apperance set them apart
from the earlier immigrants and so they were
regarded as inferiors and treated with prejudice and
hostility. The new immigrants brought foreign
languages, new customs and Catholic religion to the
country dominated by Protestants.
9) Ethnic Ghettos
At that time it was a great advantage to be a White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) and a disadvantage to
be a Catholic or a Jew, or from Italy or Eastern Europe.
They were crowding into the largest cities, especially
New York and Chicago, often forming ethnic
neighbourhoods - “Little Italies” or “Chinatowns” -
where they preserved their culture and language.
● In 1893 Chicago had the largest Czech population in
the world and nearly as many Poles as Warsaw. The
new Immigrants were criticized for living in ethnic
ghettos and reluctance to assimilate. At this time the
USA stopped expanding its territories and started
actions aimed at immigration restrictions.
● Greenpoint - Polish ghetto (urban villagers) in NY
● Hell’s Kitchen - Irish Ghetto
10) Open door
Because of new immigration Americans were afraid of
losing their established character and identity (white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestants). Growing industrialization in
the late 19th c. led industries to favour the immigration
policy of “open door” to expand the labour force.
American workers resented new immigrant labourers
who were willing to work for lower wages and so
Americans were afraid of losing their jobs. As a result,
the government responded to these prejudices of an older
wave of immigrants and Congress in the 1920s passed
quota restrictions which favoured immigration from
northern and western Europe and drastically limited the
number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
11) The National Origins Act of 1924
This act limited the admission of European immigrants
according to the proportion of their nationality present in
the American population in 1890, culminating a series of
bans on Asian immigration.
They did not want to change the society features - many
Turks, so they do not take more / a few Scandinavians, so
they can take a few more.
12) Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
This act has been the basis of American immigration law
until now. It did not change the nationality quota system
but introduced the preference system for families of
American citizens, people with residence permits and
qualified workers. This act introduced 4 preference
groups for the purposes of immigrant classification. The
first preference group combined people whose
qualifications were needed in the USA. The remaining
groups were families of people having either citizenship
or residence permits in United States.
13) Fourth Wave of Immigration 1965 - Present
● PUSH/PULL FACTORS: A new law altered the
selection of immigrants from the country they were
from , to giving priority to people who already had
family in the USA or had skills that were needed in
the labour market.
● IMMIGRANTS: Europeans, Asians, Hispanics
(Mexico)
● FACTS:
- in the 1980s and early 1990s, Asians made up
about ⅓ of the immigrants entering America.
- Hispanics made up about ½ of the number of
immigrants in the 1980s and early 1990s.
14) IRCA
In 1986, after more than a decade of contentious debate,
the U.S. Congress passed an immigration reform bill that
aimed at restoring control over undocumented
immigration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act
(IRCA) created two legalization programs affecting
nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants (staying
illegally in USA).
The IRCA offered 2 new policy tools:
● civil and criminal penalties for US employers who
hired undocumented immigrants
● The law also authorized a set of temporary,
one-time only immigration benefits programs to
“legalize” certain undocumented immigrants
already living in the USA - programs that came to
be known in the immigrant community as
“amnesty”.
15) “Melting pot” and “Salad Bowl Theory”
● In the past Americans favoured “melting pot”
(tygiel narodów) theory because they expected the
newcomers to assimilate. Thus this term refers to
the blending of values, lifestyles and institutions of
immigrant groups with the mainstream culture.
● However, with the continuation of mass migration
of different cultures a new theory appeared. It is the
“salad bowl” and it describes a situation in which
each immigrant group preserves its own unique
characteristics. So on the whole, it is a more
accurate picture of American society today
(newcomers acculturate = they do not forget their
roots).
