Immigration

Closing the Frontier

• New technologies (railroads and the mechanical reaper) opened new lands in the West for settlement

• Farming became more prosperous. • Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region of

the American West was no longer a mostly unsettled frontier fast became a region of farms, ranches, and towns.

Immigrants flock to America

• Prior to 1871, most immigrants to America came from northern and western Europe (Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden).

• During the half-century from 1871 until 1921, most immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe (Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, and present-day Hungary and Yugoslavia), as well as Asia (China and Japan).

• As before, came to America seeking freedom and better lives for their families

Immigration 1880-1920

• Late nineteenth century - an age of unprecedented geographical mobility

• Americans leaving the declining agricultural regions of the East at a dramatic rate.

• Some were moving to the newly developing farmlands of the West.

• Almost as many were moving to the cities of the East and the Midwest.

• Southern blacks left rural America for industrial cities in the 1880s.

• Escaping poverty, debt, violence, and oppression in the rural South.

• Also seeking new opportunities in cities—opportunities that were limited but usually an improvement over what they left behind.

• Factory jobs for blacks were rare and professional opportunities almost nonexistent.

• Urban blacks - worked as cooks, janitors, and domestic servants, as well as in other service occupations.

• Such jobs were considered women's work; therefore, black women often outnumbered black men in the cities.

• By the end of the nineteenth century, there were substantial black communities (10,000 people or more) in over thirty cities.

• The great numbers of new immigrants from abroad was the most important source of urban population growth in the late 19th century.

• Some came from Canada, Latin America, and—particularly on the West Coast—China and Japan.

• But, the greatest number came from Europe.

• After 1880, the flow of new arrivals began to include large numbers of people from southern and eastern Europe.

• By the 1890s, more than half of all immigrants came from these regions, as opposed to fewer than 2 percent in the 1860s.

• Earlier, most new immigrants from Europe (particularly Germans and Scandinavians) arrived with at least some money and education.

• Most arrived at one of the major port cities on the Atlantic coast (the greatest number in New York, through the famous immigrant depot on Ellis Island) and then headed west.

• Destined to be farmers or to work as businessmen, professionals, or skilled laborers in midwestern cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

• But these new immigrants of the late 19th century generally lacked the capital to buy farmland and lacked the education to establish themselves in professions.

• Like similarly poor Irish immigrants before the Civil War, they settled overwhelmingly in industrial cities, where they occupied largely unskilled jobs.