|
| 
Immigration
Contents
Immigration > Processing
New Arrivals > The Administration
of Immigration > Immigration -- Current
U.S. and New York City
Immigration
Between 1815 and 1914 more than thirty million
immigrants came to America. Roughly 1,285,000 arrived in 1907 alone.
Until 1896, most of these immigrants came from northern and western
Europe - particularly Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Germany.
After 1896, however, immigration from this region was surpassed
by people coming from eastern and southern Europe - particularly
Russia (including at that time Poland), Austria-Hungary, Italy,
and Rumania.
The European Exodus
These immigrants left their homelands for a
variety of reasons. But most were generally the victims of technology,
industrialization, and the expanding world market. The railroad
and cargo steamer drastically reduced the cost of transporting foodstuffs,
allowing farmers in the U.S., Russia, and elsewhere to compete in
and eventually dominate the European market. This devastated Europe's
own agriculture. Cheap transportation also undermined Europe's small-town
artisans who for the first time faced competition from manufactured
goods produced in the factories of the industrializing nations.
With the collapse of the feudal system across Europe, there was
little protection for farmers or artisans without work. The result
was a general movement from the countryside to the cities. Such
a migration occurred in all the countries that contributed to the
great nineteenth and early twentieth century exodus from Europe.
Once on their way, many of the migrants decided to cross the Atlantic
in search of a better life, or simply some work. American sailing
packets handled most of the trans-Atlantic migration until the Civil
War, when British and German companies took over. They introduced
steamships to the trade (comprising most of the ships by the 1870s),
dramatically reducing the length and danger of the Atlantic passage.
The shorter length of the trip - about 10 days in 1880 - enabled
those who made the journey in search of work to return to their
homelands in the winter when unskilled labor was in short demand
in the United States.
|
|
|
