Immigration.
It’s been the defining characteristic of America since before our country even began,
so it’s important to remind ourselves of our rich history...of where we all came from
to create this one-of-a-kind melting pot of people that is the United States in the 21st
century.
The first successful colony in America was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia
by English settlers.
But, these first europeans arrived in a land that was already home to other people.
To indigenous, Native Americans who thousands of years before had crossed over a land bridge
from Siberia into what’s now the state of Alaska.
They were the first explorers of this beautiful land, and they would spread throughout the
entire continent and throughout central and southern America too.
Native Americans thrived by harnessing the power of nature, and over time, they formed
into many distinct groups, each with their own languages and cultures.
Then, in 1492, as legend has it, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and arrived
in the Bahamas and immediately encountered a group of these indigenous people called
the Arawak.
The Arawak were curious and friendly, but Columbus was filled with greed, and took some
of them prisoner, demanding they show him where the gold they were wearing came from.
Now, the Native Americans were so easy going and poorly armed compared to these Europeans
- who had modern weaponry like metal-forged swords and armor, and even guns - that Columbus
said “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.”
And that’s exactly what he, and other Spanish conquistadors who came after him, did.
They vanquished indigenous group after indigenous group with cunning and sheer brutality, and
got a lot of help from diseases like smallpox that moved ahead of them and just wiped the
natives out.
“When smallpox was taken to the new world nobody in the new world had every seen a disease
like this before.
So the number of people who were susceptible was much greater.
There was no natural immunity, so the number of people who could contract the disease and
then spread, and the number of people to receive it once it’s been spread, was much higher.”
“Some scholars think there may have been a population of 20 million native americans
and the vast majority, perhaps 95%, were killed by old world diseases.
A continent virtually emptied of its people.
Once word of the discovery of the New World spread throughout the Old World - the kingdoms
and empires of Europe - many people began to plan journeys of their own across the Atlantic
Ocean.
Starting around 1620, tens of thousands of British, German and Dutch - but mostly British
Puritans - came to North America to escape religious persecution, or to search for better
opportunity, or simply for an adventure.
The Puritans spread throughout New England in the northeast, the Dutch settled along
the Hudson River in New York and established rich, successful trading posts and cities
like New Amsterdam (which we now call New York City).
English Quakers established the Pennsylvania colony and its commercial center, Philadelphia.
More than 90% of these early colonists became farmers.
And, because they were living in small, widespread villages, disease didn’t spread as easily
as it could back in Europe, which kept the death rate among settlers in America low.
All these farmers needed large families to help them farm, which caused the population
to boom, especially in the New England colonies.
As land became harder to come by along the coasts, the roughly 350,000 Scottish and Northern
Irish who arrived throughout the 1700’s settled inland in western Pennsylvania and
along the Appalachians deep into the south.
The British sent 60,000 prisoners across the ocean to Georgia, although the only thing
many of these men were guilty of was being poor and out of work.
Tobacco was a highly profitable cash crop in the southern colonies, so many British
settled there and began to take advantage of the thriving slave trade.
“Those of us who study immigration history think in terms of why people leave their homelands
and why they come here.
And those are generally encapsulated in two words: push and pull.
Something pushes them out of their homeland and something pulls them to the United States.
Now obviously in the earliest cases of slavery they were not necessarily pushed from their
homeland, but they were taken from their homeland.
But the reason why they were taken was because there was labor to be done here in the United
States.
It was a global force, the slave trade was fairly global - at least in the Atlantic - and
later Asia would become involved in it as well.
So here you have a forced migration.”
Hundreds of thousands of Africans were mercilessly captured and taken prisoner in their own lands,
then put on ships bound for America, where they were sold into a life of hard labor for
no pay, and no chance at freedom.
[Graph] This is the population breakdown of the country around 1790, shortly after the
colonies’ hard-won war of independence with the British and the adoption of the American
constitution, which made the country of the United States official.
The Native American population was so decimated by disease, war, and migration to the west,
that only about 100,000 were left inside the territorial United States.
Out west, many Spaniards moved north from Mexico across the Rio Grande to settle in
California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Not all of these settlers were of European descent.
They all could speak spanish, but ethnically, they were a melting pot of whites, Indians
and mestizos, or people of mixed race.
French settlers established footholds mainly along the Saint Lawrence River and the Great
Lakes, along the Mississippi River, and along the Gulf Coast, establishing the city of New
Orleans.
Their descendants are known as Cajuns.
These French and Spanish populations would be incorporated into the United States in
the coming decades through the Louisiana Purchase and the granting of statehood to the western
territories.
After more than four decades of relatively little immigration into America after its
founding, in the 1830’s, tens of thousands of immigrants began arriving on her eastern
shores, again, mainly from Britain, Ireland and Germany.
Some were attracted to the cheap farmland that was made available by westward expansion,
while others took advantage of the manufacturing boom in the cities sparked by the industrial
revolution.
The Irish were mainly unskilled laborers who built most of the railroads and canals, took
jobs in the emerging textile mill towns in the Northeast, or worked in the ports.
About half of the Germans became farmers, mainly in the midwest, and the other half
became craftsman in urban areas.
Asian immigrants - mainly from China - began crossing the Pacific to work as laborers,
particularly on the transcontinental railroad or in the mines.
[History Professor Scott Wong] “Immigration also during the 19th century was usually male
dominated—males in their prime working years between the years of 18-25.
The Irish being the one exception.
Eventually there would be more Irish women who immigrated than Irish men.
Immigrants to this day often follow established patterns.
They leave on village or one city and go to another city in the United States because
someone has already established that pattern for them.
People go to where they know people.
And those people here can often arrange for jobs and places to live and so on.
It was often said that your first job coming off the boat was whoever picked you up at
the docks.
Now people say your first job is whoever picked you up at the airport.
[Show graph] After tripling from the decade before, in
just two more decades, from the 1830s to the 1850s, the amount of immigrants arriving in
the US each year tripled again, to about 170,000.
By the 1850s, when the total population of the country passed 20 million and things began
to get a bit crowded, America’s first measurable anti-immigrant feelings began to take root,
mainly targeting Irish-catholic immigrants who were arriving in large numbers to escape
the poverty and death of the potato famine that was hitting them hard at home.
But with a huge boom on the horizon, this early xenophobia was nothing compared to what
would come later.
Large, steam-powered ships took to the seas after 1880, replacing the older, slower sailing
ships, which meant it was suddenly much faster - and cheaper - to cross the ocean, making
the dream of a journey to America more accessible to many around the world.
“Processed and ticketed, they waited for their ship.
They boarded in many parts of Europe and in many kinds of vessels.
Most to New York and some to other ports.
But they had one thing in common—they were traveling steerage, and the steamship companies
understood the profit in numbers.”
[Chart] Before long, millions of immigrants were arriving
on America’s shores.
They passed through immigration processing stations like Ellis Island in New York and
Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.
This wave was much more diverse than before.
Coming mainly from Southern Europe, it was led by Italians, Poles, Greeks, Swedes, Norwegians,
Hungarians, Jews, Lebanese, and Syrians.
“It was as if god’s great promise had been fulfilled.
I’m going into a free land.
I don’t think I ever can explain the feeling I had that time.
It’s not my native land, but it means more to me than my native land—it means more
to me than my native land…Any country on earth this never happen.
And become a human being again--it’s a miracle...everybody had hopes.
And one thing I was sure, and thousands like me: that the degradation, and the abuse, and
the piration that we had in Europe, we wouldn’t have here.”
This group was young, most were under 30 years old, mainly because an entire generation of
the children of farmers and factory workers in Europe and the Russian empire couldn’t
find work because the owners of the farms and factories preferred to have an efficient
machine - that they didn’t have to pay - do the work instead of a human being.
Well, this was fine by America, whose steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production
industries were booming.
It happily took in this pool of eager, hard workers and put them to work in its growing
industrial cities.
“As mills and factories sprouted across the land, cities grew up around them.
In turn, the cities beckoned to workers by the millions from the American countryside
and from overseas to fuel the burgeoning industrialization.
What was once a rural nation was rapidly becoming an urban state.
From 1860 to 1910, the urban population grew from over 6 million to over 44 million.”
The United States also took full advantage of Europe’s paralyzation during the first
World War.
With millions dying in the midst of the bloodiest struggle the European continent had ever seen,
every country there had to completely focus its industries on producing all the supplies
- the guns, the uniforms, the tanks, the boats, the bullets - all the stuff needed to carry
on and win the fight.
But with many of its working-aged men on the front lines, in hospitals or at home after
horrific injuries - or dead - the factories of Europe couldn’t meet all the demand,
so US factories made up for the shortfall in production.
Before long, the United States had leapt to the front ranks of the world’s economic
giants.
And when the Americans entered the conflict themselves in 1917, US industry was now tasked
with supplying its own soldiers too.
It was during this 50-year immigration wave, from about 1870-1920, when many well-off,
white, native-born Americans began to consider mass immigration a danger to the health and
security of the country.
They started actively organizing to exert political power to slow it down.
The first immigration law in American history was known as the Asian Exclusion Act.
It was passed in 1875 and - you guessed it - outlawed Asians, specifically Asian contract
laborers, from stepping foot on American soil, plus any other people considered convicts
in their own countries.
In 1921, Congress pushed through a law that marked a turning-point in American immigration
policy--a law that passed the Senate 78-1.
The Emergency Quota Act set strict limits on the amount of immigrants who would be allowed
into the country each year.
It was very effective.
The number of new immigrants let in fell from over 800,000 in 1920 to just over 300,000
admitted in 1921.
[CHART] If the pace of immigration had been like a
raging river, this law acted like a dam.
But that drop off in the flow of persons into America still didn’t satisfy the anti-immigration
crowd who, just three years later in 1924, forced congress to tighten the quota even
more, established the border patrol, and stated that any undocumented immigrants who entered
the country were subject to deportation.
It’s during this time that the definition of “illegal alien” was born, a term that
would be used to stigmatize the next group the anti-immigration community’s crosshairs
became fixed on: latin-american migrants living and working in the US Southwest.
After the quota laws passed by the US Congress in the 1920’s, immigration was capped for
the first time in American history.
One of the exceptions to the strict quotas were documented contract workers from the
western hemisphere who could come into and out of the US freely.
The other major exception were the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were allowed
in, mainly Jews escaping the horrors of the Holocaust during and after World War II, and
the roughly 400,000 families who fled Cuba after the Castro-led revolution of 1959.
The US entrance into World War II also meant many more Mexican workers were needed to fill
in for all the young American men who were off fighting the Germans in Europe and the
Japanese in the Pacific.
At the end of this period, between 1944 and 1954, the number of immigrants coming from
Mexico increased by 6,000 percent, as many Latin American workers were offered low wage
agricultural jobs in the American Southwest as part of the bracero program.
But large numbers of Mexicans without the necessary paperwork came in search of the
American dream too, and what followed is one of the ugliest periods in US immigration history.
With pressure mounting to do something about the thousands of immigrants easily crossing
the southern border each year, President Eisenhower turned to Gen. Joseph Swing, who launched
“Operation Wetback” in 1954.
That derogatory name reveals the insensitivity of the policy, which directed hundreds of
federal officials to lead thousands of local police officers on sweeps through neighborhoods
throughout the American southwest, stopping any “Mexican looking” person and demanding
to see their papers.
If they didn’t have their papers, they were arrested and deported.
Some estimates put the amount of illegal immigrants thrown out of the country above one million,
leading to countless families being torn apart.
In some cases, their American-born children were even sent away.
Obviously, this program angered many Mexican-American citizens, and anyone else who saw it as a
blatant violation of human rights on a massive scale.
[History professor Miguel Levario] “What we have here is an aggressive and sort of
paramilitary approach to deportation and mass deportation and of course the use of propaganda
to address the issue of unauthorized Mexican workers in the United States.
Because the Border Patrol agency was so small - I mean, they’re using local law enforcement
- so while they’re out there trying to look for undocumented immigrants what aren’t
they doing?
Their own basic responsibilities of keeping neighborhoods safe, addressing burglaries,
murders, whatever it could be.
Operation Wetback was terminated in large part because of cost, in large part because
it just became too taxing on local resources.
We also found out that regardless of how far you sent them into the interior, within days,
sometimes weeks, they were right back in there.
The final era of immigration to America is the one we’re still currently in, which
began in 1965 with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act.
This law finally replaced the unfair quota system with a policy that gives preference
to immigrants who have relatives already in the United States, or people with job skills
that are highly sought after.
All other past restrictions targeting specific groups were thrown out.
This was one of the crown jewels in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program and
it fundamentally shifted who was allowed in.
[CHART]
In 1970, 60% of immigrants came from Europe, this number just fell off a cliff by the year
2000, when only 15% were from Europe.
The one thing that didn’t change were the many undocumented immigrants from Latin America
who continued to come across the border in search of a better life.
So, in an effort to address this, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration
Reform and Control Act, which gave green cards to about 2.7 million immigrants.
It was the largest single moment of legalization in American history.
As a conservative from the anti-immigration party in modern America, the Republican Reagan
compromised in exchange for more restrictions on employers who hire illegal immigrants,
and tighter border security.
But it was a flawed law in a number of ways, mainly, it didn’t effectively fix the broken
system that was allowing businesses to hire illegal immigrants in the first place.
So since the businesses could still break the rules, many low paying jobs remained for
the millions of undocumented immigrants in America that the law didn’t legalize.
The bill also didn’t adequately fund and equip the border patrol, which meant there
was still a fairly consistent flow of people coming across the border.
To fix some of these problems, Sen. Ted Kennedy introduced, and Congress passed, the Immigration
Act of 1990, which President George H.W.
Bush signed into law.
This increased the number of legal immigrants entering the United States from around 500,000
per year to 700,000--an increase of 40%.
This bill is also noteworthy because it was bipartisan, with a democratically-controlled
congress working with a Republican president to pass major, common-sense immigration reform.
Since the passage of that 1990 bill, about 1,000,000 immigrants on average legally achieve
residence in the United States each year.
These are the top ten countries ranked by the number of legal immigrants from these
countries who came to the United States in 2013 according to the Department of Homeland
Security.
[Chart]
According to the 2010 Census, these are the countries from which all immigrants currently
in the United States came from, ranked by the total number of people in America who
say they were born in each country.
Today, 14.3 percent of the total American population is foreign born.
That’s more than 45,000,000 people.
The United States is home to nearly 20% of all the immigrants in the world.
It’s estimated that more than 10 million of the immigrants in the United States are
here illegally, living in the shadows.
Thank you for watching, I hope you gained a greater appreciation for who we are as a
nation and how immigration has allowed us to attract people from all over the rest of
the world, how that is the single-most important factor in binding us together and making us
such a dynamic country.
This video was proudly created by the two-brother team that is the daily conversation, the video
editor Brendan Plank and myself.
Until next time, for TDC, I’m Bryce Plank.
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