Changing U.S. Immigration

The United States plays a special role in the study of international migration. The world’s third-most populous country is inhabited overwhelmingly by direct descendants of immigrants. About 80 million people migrated to the United States between 1820 and 2018, including 45 million who were alive in 2018.

The United States has had three main eras of immigration:

• Colonial settlement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

• Mass European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• Asian and Latin American immigration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

U.S. Immigration at Independence

The U.S. population at the first census after independence, in 1790, was 3,900,000, including 950,000 who had immigrated to one of the colonies now part of the United States. Immigration to the American colonies and the newly independent United States came from two principal places:

• Europe. According to the 1790 census, 62 percent of immigrants came from Europe, of which 45–50 percent came from the lands comprising the modern day United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Colonies were established by British immigrants along the Atlantic coast, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

• Sub-Saharan Africa. Most African Americans are descended from Africans forced to migrate to the Western Hemisphere as part of the slave trade in order to work on plantations (see Chapter 7). At the time of independence, 360,000 people living in the United States—38 percent of immigrants—had been shipped as slaves from Africa to the colonies, primarily by the British. The importation of Africans as slaves was made illegal in 1808, though another 250,000 Africans were brought to the United States during the next half-century.

Most of the Africans were captured and forcibly transported to the United States where they were bought and sold as property. In contrast, most Europeans were voluntary migrants. However, harsh economic conditions and religious persecution in Europe blurred the distinction between forced and voluntary migration for many Europeans.

Nineteenth-Century U.S.Immigration

Between 1820 and 1920, approximately 33 million people immigrated to the United States. Nearly 90 percent emigrated from Europe. For European migrants, the United States offered a great opportunity for economic success. Early migrants extolled the virtues of the country to friends and relatives back in Europe, which encouraged still others to come.

Migration from Europe to the United States peaked at several points during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

• 1840s and 1850s: Ireland and Germany. Annual immigration jumped from 30,000 to more than 200,000. Three-fourths of all U.S. immigrants during those two decades came from Ireland and Germany. Desperate economic factors compelled the Irish and Germans to cross the Atlantic. Germans also emigrated to escape political unrest.

• 1870s: Ireland and Germany. Emigration from Ireland and Germany resumed following a temporary decline during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865).

• 1880s: Scandinavia. Immigration increased to 500,000 per year. Increasing numbers of Scandinavians, especially Swedes and Norwegians, joined Germans and Irish in migrating to the United States. The Industrial Revolution had diffused to Scandinavia, triggering a rapid population increase.

• 1905–1914: Southern and Eastern Europe. Annual migration to the United States reached 1 million. Two-thirds of all immigrants during this period came from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. The shift in the primary source of immigrants coincided with the diffusion of the Industrial Revolution to Southern and Eastern Europe, along with rapid population growth. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 2 million Jews immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe to escape religious persecution.

Among European countries, Germany has sent the largest number of immigrants to the United States, 7.2 million. Other major European sources include Italy, 5.4 million; the United Kingdom, 5.3 million; Ireland, 4.8 million; and Russia and the former Soviet Union, 4.1 million. About one-fourth of Americans trace their ancestry to German immigrants, and one-eighth each to Irish and English immigrants.

Note that frequent boundary changes in Europe make precise national counts impossible. For example, most Poles migrated to the United States at a time when Poland did not exist as an independent country. Until the end of World War I in 1918, Austria-Hungary encompassed portions of present-day Austria, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, and many immigrants are recorded as coming from Austria-Hungary rather than the present-day countries.

Recent U.S. Immigration

Immigration to the United States dropped sharply in the 1930s and 1940s during the Great Depression and World War II. The number of immigrants steadily increased beginning in the 1950s, and then surged to historically high levels during the first decade of the twenty-first century

Two Centuries of Immigration To The United States

More than three-fourths of the recent U.S. immigrants have emigrated from two regions:

• Latin America. Around 18 million Latin Americans have migrated to the United States in the past sixty years, compared to only 2 million in the two preceding centuries. Officially, nearly one-half million emigrate to the United States annually from Latin America, more than twice as many as during the entire nineteenth century.

• Asia. Around 14 million Asians have migrated to the United States in the past sixty years, compared to only 1 million in the two preceding centuries. The leading sources of U.S. immigrants from Asia are China (including Hong Kong), the Philippines, India, and Vietnam.

Officially, Mexico passed Germany in 2006 as the country of origin of the most immigrants ever to the United States. Unofficially, because of the large number of undocumented immigrants, Mexico probably became the leading source during the 1980s. In the early 1990s, an unusually large number of immigrants came from Mexico and other Latin American countries as a result of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which issued visas to several hundred thousand people who had entered the United States in previous years without legal documents.

Although the pattern of immigration to the United States has changed from predominantly European to Asian and Latin American, the reason for immigration remains the same. Rapid population growth limited prospects for economic advancement at home. Europeans left when their countries entered stage 2 of the demographic transition in the nineteenth century, and Latin Americans and Asians began to leave in large numbers in recent years after their countries entered stage 2. With poor conditions at home, immigrants were lured by economic opportunity and social advancement in the United States.

The motives for immigrating to the country may be similar, but the United States has changed over time. The United States is no longer a sparsely settled, economically booming country with a large supply of unclaimed land. In 1912, New Mexico and Arizona were admitted as the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states. Thus, for the first time in its history, all the contiguous territory of the country was a “united” state (other than the District of Columbia). This symbolic closing of the frontier coincided with the end of the peak period of emigration from Europe.

Pause & Reflect 3.1.4

In which stage of the demographic transition were most countries when they sent the most immigrants to the United States? Why was this the case?