Essay About Colonial Period And Large Scale

U.S. Built by Immigrants
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America was built by immigrants. From Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth
century
to Ellis Island in the twentieth, people born elsewhere came to
America. Some
were fleeing religious persecution and political turmoil. Most,
however, came
for economic reasons and were part of extensive migratory systems that
responded to changing demands in labor markets. Their experience in the
United
States was as diverse as their backgrounds and aspirations. Some became
farmers
and others toiled in factories. Some settled permanently and others
returned to
their homeland. Collectively, however, they contributed to the building
nation by providing a constant source of inexpensive labor, by settling
rural
regions and industrial cities, and by bringing their unique forms of
political
and cultural expression.
The volume of immigration before the 1960s was staggering. Figures for
colonial period are imprecise, but by the time of the first census of
nearly 1 million Afro-Americans and 4 million Europeans resided in the
United
States. The European population originated from three major streams:
English
and Welsh, Scotch-Irish, and German.
After 1820, the data became exact enough to document the volume of
immigration
more reliably. From 1820 to 1975 some 47 million people came to the
United
States: 8.3 million from other countries in the Western Hemisphere, 2.2
million
from Asia, and 35.9 million from Europe. The stream was relatively
continuous
from 1820 to 1924 with only brief interruptions caused by the Civil War
occasional periods of economic downturns such as the depression of the
1890s,
the panic of 1907-1908, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. World
War II, of
course, also greatly reduced the numbers emigrating. In fact, 32
million of the
35.9 million Europeans who came to the United States between 1820 and
1975 came
prior to 1924.
Immigration on such a large scale resulted in greater ethnic diversity
from the
earlier colonial structure. In the century prior to World War I, the
major
sources of immigrants were Germany, Italy, Ireland, Austria-Hungary,
Russia,
and Great Britain, but Canada also supplied 4 million newcomers,
including a
large number of French-Canadians, and Mexico sent some 2 million. These
emigrant centers supplied the largest ethnic concentrations in American
society
before the 1960s.
Immigrants to colonial America were welcomed because of its acute need
inexpensive labor.
The English and Afro-Americans were quickly joined by Scotch-Irish,
Scots, and
German settlers. As many as 250,000 Scotch-Irish immigrated to the
colonies
before 1776.
But after the 1880s, the demand was almost exclusively for unskilled
workers to
fill the growing number of factory jobs.
was the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which curtailed immigration by
establishing
annual quotas that favored