A Brief History of Immigration to the United States
A Brief History of Immigration to the United States
moonviper890 Who is moving to another country?
I’m Mr. Beat
I’m an American, but my ancestors weren’t.
Today, the United States has more immigrants BY FAR than any other country in the world. But that’s misleading. At least 59 countries accept more immigrants than the United States, as least as a percentage of their total population. More than 21% of Canada’s population are immigrants. Nearly 39% of Saudi Arabia’s population are immigrants. And more than 88% of the United Arab Emirates population are immigrants. Wow. The United States? Only around 15% of its current population are immigrants.
Still, the United States has a long and proud tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world. Well…ok…kind of. More on that in a bit.
But first, let’s get some definitions out of the way. (pointing to Dictionary)
A citizen is a person who owes allegiance to a country and in turn is entitled to that country’s protection
An immigrant is a person who leaves one country to permanently live in another country.
A migrant is a person who moves far away from their home, just in general. Most migrants move to find better paying work, and yes, most migrants end up being immigrants.
A refugee is a person who flees one country for another to escape danger. These dangers include stuff like wars, natural disasters, famine, religious persecution, and political oppression.
Ok, got THAT out of the way…
Immigration is currently a hot button issue in the United States, meaning it causes Americans to get all riled up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJc3tUNDrUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmpFL3Ff8GY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRdwBNCeO2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKGayUok-SU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKwuP6dlzJw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Y2Y7v3qlQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lClFSMEW_Vk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzsntsSTPiQ
Well, it’s a hot button issue because certain media outlets have made it a hot button issue. Look at THAT hot button. That’s hot. Anyway, because immigration is such a hot-button issue, I figured it’d make sense to make a brief video about the history of immigration in the United States. So here is a brief video about the history of immigration in the United States. (awkward pause) After the sponsor read.
-The First Immigrants-
For thousands of years, human beings lived in what is today a country known as the United States. Today most folks call them “Native Americans,” or “American Indians.” But then, beginning in the late 1400s, Europeans began coming over to explore the area. Most were from either Spain or Portugal. Ok ok ok….almost 500 years before that Leif Eriksson was technically the first known European to explore North America, but it was only after Christopher Columbus explored the Americas beginning in the 1490s did a flood of European explorers follow. Later French, English, and Dutch explorers came over.
They came over not only to explore, but many came over to conquer. By the mid-1500s, Europeans began to attempt to colonize the area. As the Europeans began to arrive more and more, they brought with them new plants, animals, ideas, and technology. They also brought new diseases. Diseases that Native Americans were not used to. Diseases that Native Americans were not immune to. It’s estimated that as many as 95% of Native Americans ultimately died from diseases brought over by European settlers, killing as many as 60 million people. So many Native Americans died that it caused the entire planet to cool, man. More often than not, European settlers didn’t encounter hostile Native Americans. They likely encountered a mysterious, post-apocalyptic world of empty cities.
But millions of Native Americans survived. At first, most Native American nations and European settlers got along and benefited greatly from trade. However, with more and more Europeans coming, Native Americans had a hard time keeping up with trade. This caused men to hunt more, which hurt the gender balance which had previously existed in the tribe.
Not only that, as more and more Europeans came, they had this habit of just claiming land for themselves. The Native American idea of land was generally very different from the European idea of land. Many Native Americans practiced communal land ownership, meaning the entire community owned and shared the land. Europeans generally bought and sold land exclusively and individually. This different understanding of land ownership led to confusion and later conflict. Sure, European colonists and Native Americans signed treaties. These treaties often said that the European colonists would respect Native American sovereignty and land rights. And yet, time and time again, future colonists would break these promises and violate the treaties. New treaties would be drawn, and the process would repeat, until eventually, Native Americans were simply pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations of mostly less desirable land.
From the end of the 1500s up through the 1800s, across the continent, Native American nations would straight up go to war with first Europeans and then later Americans to preserve their way of life, but, more often than not, struggled to win due to having fewer soldiers and inferior military technology, among many other things.
By the 1600s, three distinct groups of immigrants came to settle in what became the United States. Economic immigrants, religious immigrants, and forced immigrants.
Economic immigrants, which historically is the most common type of immigrant anywhere, by the way. They came to the future United States looking to make more money. This group also included indentured servants, or people who paid for their passage to the New World by being forced to work for somebody for a certain number of years before getting their freedom. Up to 2/3 of European immigrants who came to the American colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution were indentured servants.
Religious immigrants. They came to practice their religion freely. This included some of the most famous immigrants in American history, the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth Colony…for real.
And finally, forced immigrants. Those who came over as slaves, mostly from Africa.
Some of the earliest slaves were actually Native Americans, but they tended to die from European diseases or escape, so Africans became more preferable.
In 1619, a Dutch ship brought the first twenty African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia. From there, slavery spread throughout the American colonies. Over the next 200 hundred years, millions more would arrive to work large tobacco, indigo, and rice plantations in what would become the United States.
-Protestant and English-
So, by this point in the video, you might be wondering why I’m speaking English. Well that’s because the English immigrants became the dominant immigrant group by the mid-1600s. Even today, people with English ancestry arguably make up the largest group of Americans, though it’s difficult to know for sure. We do know that 7 out of the 10 most common surnames in the United States are of English or British Isles origin. The other three are of Spanish origin.
But don’t be fooled by the English o espanol hablo ahora. I just have easily could have been speaking Nederlands op dit moment.
You see, the Dutch settled much of the Hudson River Valley in the 1600s. Many Germans settled in the Delaware River Valley, as well as Swedes, Finns, and Ulster Scots. Most of these immigrants practiced some form of Christianity. There were Puritans, Quakers, Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists, Presbyterians, and Mennonites, among others. There was also a sizable Jewish population.
By the 1700s, the American colonies were a surprisingly diverse place. But much of North America was French, don’t you forget about it punks! Well, until the French and Indian War. From 1754 to 1763, the British colonies and French colonies fought in that war, and uh yeah…the British won. Again, I’m speaking English to you right now, aren’t I?
And then, the colonists rose up against the British in the aforementioned American Revolution. The United States was born. In the early years of the new country, there was relatively little immigration. Why? (scoffs) Well, because the United States wasn’t that impressive back then. Remember, in the early years of the republic, the country wasn’t that powerful or rich yet. Plus, it was still ridiculously difficult to get to the United States from most of the rest of the world back then. This was before Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Oh, and before planes, trains and automobiles, and steam-powered ships.
-The Rise of Nativism-
Still, some immigrants managed to make the difficult, months-long journey to the United States anyway, mainly because things REALLY sucked back in their home countries. Between the 1830s and 1850s, most immigrants who came to the country were from Britain, Germany, and Ireland.
Even though the United States has always been multicultural, many immigrants who came began to culturally assimilate into a new distinctly American culture. By the way, cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority culture gets absorbed into the dominant culture of a society. The British immigrants usually culturally assimilated into the United States pretty easily…since ya know. Remember? America used to be British, partner. Anyway, the large numbers of Germans and Irish did NOT culturally assimilate as easily. For starters, many didn’t speak English. Second, many were Roman Catholic, and the United States was a heavily PROTESTANT country. Third, many of these new immigrants were poor. Many of the Irish came to the United States to escape not just poverty, but DEATH, as they came during the Great Famine, a period of starvation and disease that devastated Ireland and caused the island’s population to fall by as much as 25%. But anyway…yeah…the Irish were treated like crap by many Americans.
As more and more non-British and non-Protestant Christian immigrants came to the United States, a new, “nativist” movement emerged. Nativism is the political policy of promoting or protecting people BORN in a country over those immigrating to it. American nativism was so widespread by the 1850s that an entire political movement sprung up around it. The Know Nothings, who originally formed a political party called the Native American Party and yes, ran candidates for president that did fairly well and they even won local elections. By the American Civil War, though, the Know Nothing movement had thankfully faded, but nativism never fully went away. In fact, in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s still very present today.
Between 1820 and 1870, more than 7.5 million immigrants came to the United States, which was more than the entire population of the country in 1810, to put it in perspective.
-Wait a second, should we limit immigration?-
I probably should have already brought this fact up, but for most of the early history of the United States, the country basically had no immigration laws. Borders were open, and anyone who could afford a boat ticket and show up could enter the country. This all began to change in the late 1800s. Why, you ask? Freaking why? Because a ton of immigrants began to show up from ALL OVER THE WORLD.
You see, by the mid-1800s, now the United States was a much more desirable place to relocate to since lots of people there were making lots of money. Plus, it became a lot cheaper and faster to travel to. Between 1820 and 1900, around five million Germans immigrated to the United States, mostly settling in an area known today as the Midwest. Hundreds of thousands of Scandinavian immigrants also mostly settled in the Midwest to farm. But what troubled nativists more were the flood of immigrants now coming from Eastern and Southern Europe. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately 5.3 million immigrants came from Italy alone. And yep, many of THEM were also Roman Catholic. And yep, many of them were also treated like crap by Americans. But one group of immigrants was especially targeted. Chinese Americans. Starting with the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s, a bunch of Chinese workers began coming to the Western states. Americans were particularly vicious to the Chinese. There are at least hundreds of documented cases of violence against Chinese Americans in western states in the second half of the 1800s. Americans routinely destroyed their property and kicked them out of town. There were straight up MASSACRES of the Chinese. Anti-Chinese sentiment was so mainstream that the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration and said that Chinese folks could not become American citizens.
The Chinese Exclusion Act is the only law in American history to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating to the United States.
That same year, Congress passed another law taxing non-citizens and banning immigrants who were criminals, had mental illness, or were “unable to take care of him or herself.” Ok then.
-The biggest backlash against immigration yet-
By the early 1900s, many immigrants began to arrive in America from the Middle East and Mexico. However, most Americans at the time seemed to be more afraid of Mexican immigrants than Middle Eastern immigrants. Middle Easterners were even considered “white” at the time. Due to the instability caused by the Mexican Revolution, in particular, hundreds of thousands of Mexican refugees began fleeing to the United States, prompting the United States to send troops to the border and complete the first barrier between the two countries in 1911. It only was in one town, though.
A more expansive border fence that went beyond local areas only began to go up in the 1990s, by the way. Yep, the 1990s. More on that in a bit.
Only in 1917 did Congress begin trying to expand its limitations on immigration. That year, it passed the Literacy Act, which said immigrants had to take literacy tests. It also banned immigrants from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Two years later, in arguably the craziest year in American history, the First Red Scare swept the country. It was a moral panic in which Americans were irrationally afraid of and paranoid about those who leaned to the left politically. Nothing better demonstrates this paranoia than the Palmer Raids, when the U.S. Department of Justice captured, arrested, and deported suspected socialists, communists, and anarchists. These raids specifically targeted both Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
And finally, there was the Immigration Act of 1924. Congress passed it in 1924. Oh you probably already knew that…from the name of the law, but I just wanted to make sure we were clear on that. It prevented immigration from Asia and dramatically limited the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Immigration Act of 1924 also established the U.S. Border Patrol, the country’s first formal border security organization. Between the 1920s and 1950s, residents of only three countries—Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom—got nearly 70% of visas available to enter the United States and immigration dropped to some of the lowest levels in American history. During this time, the federal government did begin accepting more and more refugees from around the world, but notably turned down Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany in the years right before and during World War Two. Ooof.
Things began to become…uh…SOMEWHAT less nativist in the 1930s when foreign-born children of American mothers and non-citizen fathers could more easily become citizens. In 1934, the Tydings–McDuffie Act said 50 Filipino immigrants could become citizens each year. Yay. But during the Second Red Scare, nativism rose yet again. By that time, Mexicans were often targeted. Heck, that was a big reason why cannabis became illegal. Government officials referred to cannabis as “marijuana” to make the drug more Mexican-sounding. Americans freaked out more about Mexican immigrants after World War Two ended, when the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border skyrocketed. In 1954, the U.S. Border Control used military-style tactics to kick out thousands of Mexican immigrants in something known as Operation Wetback.
But still, by the 1950s, there was no stopping immigration. Everybody in the world, it seemed, wanted to live in the United States of America. It was, after all, the richest and most powerful country in the world. The land of opportunity. In fact, immigrants were now willing to risk EVERYTHING in order to come.
-The backlash ends-
So that’s why many were like…let’s just make it easier to immigrate here? Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Passed in uh…yeah…in 1965. How about that? Makes sense.
The law created a preference system that gave priority to relatives and children of American citizens and permanent residents, as well as others with specialized skills and refugees. Simply put, it made immigration more fair and open. It undid the preference for Northern European immigrants, putting all countries on a level field, and opening up immigration to the rest of the world. This is still the system the country has today.
Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, there of course have been times when a lot of refugees have been accepted into the country, particularly those escaping war. Notably, in the mid-1970s, a bunch of Vietnamese refugees came over as part of the aftermath of the Vietnam War. I made a video about that war. In 1982, the Supreme Court said a Texas law that withheld money from educating students of undocumented immigrants was unconstitutional. I made a video about that case.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration and Reform and Control Act, the first law to penalize employers for hiring undocumented immigrants…although it ultimately didn’t penalize them much. It also gave amnesty for undocumented immigrants, meaning they were forgiven for being undocumented. The Immigration and Reform and Control Act ultimately granted amnesty for nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. The RADICAL LEFTIST PRESIDENT Ronald Reagan signed into law! On June 15, 2012, THE RADICAL LEFTIST PRESIDENT Barack Obama announced a controversial policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, aka DACA. It’s also still in place to this day, and it says that undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children can seek ways to not be deported and more easily get work opportunities.
In recent decades, the vast majority of immigrants coming to the United States, legal or otherwise, have come from Asia, Mexico, and Central America. But yes…the undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America have gotten most of the attention. Since the 1990s, the federal government has built approximately 654 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. A mix of vehicle barriers and walls. There are still gaps, which the Biden administration is currently filling. But that hasn’t stopped the flood of undocumented immigrants crossing into the country. This has led to a nativist swing yet again, with more and more Americans calling for tighter border security.
And that’s about it. That gets us up to speed. Moving forward, Americans basically have two options for the future- make it easier to become a legal citizen or make it much more difficult to become one. But, there ya go. Here’s to the future.
Sources/further reading:
https://publications.iom.int/books/world-migration-report-2024
White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall by Reece Jones
Purchase here: https://amzn.to/4bh5Aq8
Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Purchase here: https://amzn.to/44H87HL
https://sojo.net/articles/how-united-arab-emirates-country-90-percent-immigrants-handles-immigration
Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border by Rachel St. John
Purchase here: https://amzn.to/3V6OANW
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170391
