They came from cities like Cork, and Liverpool, and Oslo and small towns like Kenmare, Shaftesbury, Vernazza, and Görlitz.
They worked jobs as blacksmiths, farmers, pastry chefs, and tailors. Their days started and ended in darkness. Whatever they made went to their families, ever growing and ever in need. Their lives were lived in poverty, and they planned not by months and years but by sunrises and sunsets. They wanted to come to America because for generations they had heard the great tales of a land that was more than just milk and honey, but growth and money. They heard from relatives who had made the trip to places like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—and from others who continued inland and found what they were looking for in places like Chicago, Madison, and Detroit. The land seemed endless and open, as new cities and industries rose across the ever-expanding nation like seeds blowing and blooming across a prairie.
For all of human history, the world had been defined by birth, by place, and by circumstance. In a very real way, this new place called America and its open door had changed all that for millions and millions of people living in Europe. For the four million Black slaves in the South—whose American ancestry extended long before the Revolution—that growth meant an indescribable inhumanity, and the continuance of an institution with bonds that could only be broken by disunion. But for the millions across the Atlantic, who sailed the same waters in rags that African slaves had sailed in chains two centuries prior and came to work jobs selling the cotton picked in Mississippi, and smoking the tobacco planted in North Carolina, America, and all that it entailed represented an unknowable yet irresistible future, one that no matter what, would not be possible in the Old World.
So, as W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “the world came to America.”
These were immigrants, and their desire knew no border, no flag, and no anthem. Their actions were based in human instinct, not an encapsulation of ideals. The Old World was just that, a land defined by an increasingly ancient past. America, it seemed had no past, only a future. And soon enough, those who came became Americans themselves. And they had children and grandchildren who soon forgot whatever came before. And these immigrants weren’t just limited to America’s cities, but much of the land west of the Mississippi, as well. In 1862, the Homestead Act became law, which gave away 160 million acres—10 percent of the total U.S. land area—to those making their way west, for free. Many of those who received this land were immigrants, and all of them were white, and the Native Americans they encountered soon died by disease or Western weaponry. Families roamed and rambled, and now this land was their land, from California to the New York Island.
But soon they decided, this land was made not for you but for me.
After nearly a century of unfettered entry—in the 1800s, 19 million immigrants came to America with few, if any, barriers—the door began to close. First, there had been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented all Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. to end the competition white workers had endured in the wake of the California Gold Rush and economic tumult of the 1870s. Slowly, the scope of American politics began to set its sights on immigrants, who came in once unrestricted, and were now unwanted, largely by the sons and daughters of those who came as immigrants themselves from countries like Ireland, England, France and Germany. Alongside those from Asia, these new immigrants—14.5 million total in the first two decades of the 20th century—were now predominantly Italian, Polish, and Russian—and increasingly, they were either Catholic or Jewish.
These immigrants—through the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1891, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, and the Emergency Quota Law of 1921—began to be viewed not through the benefit they could provide but the burden they could cause. The United States was no longer wide open and free. The end of slavery unleashed four million Black Americans into the labor force, and as the twentieth century began, free Black Americans began to enter northern cities in droves, competing for jobs with white immigrants. The nation was becoming a closer conception of its modern form. In 1865 there were 25 states in the Union; by 1915, there were 48. The frontier, as Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893, had closed. As World War I broke out in Europe, millions at home rallied around calls for more isolation, not less. When the war came to an end after America’s brief entry, those calls only grew.
Rumors began to fly that those coming in—human beings in search of a better life who were now referred to with terms such as “illegal” and “alien”—were somehow defective. That their very DNA was less capable of productivity and civility than older immigrants, who were now losing their accents and becoming as American as Plymouth Rock. A growing eugenics movement inferred that Blacks, Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans were an inherent threat to not just the labor force, but to the American experiment itself. One of the leading eugenicists at the time, the Harvard trained Charles Davenport, argued that Italians were prone to “crimes of personal violence,” and that Jews possessed “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest.” This, he argued, meant that the U.S. should not “adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.” At the same time, a revitalized Ku Klux Klan cast Catholics and Jews into their umbrella of hatred and saw their membership numbers surpass those after the Civil War.
And then, one hundred years ago, the door closed.
On May 26, 1924—during an election year—President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924. All immigrants from Asia were banned; the total annual immigration was to be limited to 165,000; quotas were instituted for each nation; and for the first time, a national Border Patrol was created. Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, “America must remain American.” The New York Times ran a headline declaring, “America of the Melting Pot Comes to An End,” with the subhead line including, “Chief Aim…Is to Preserve Racial Type As It Exists Here Today.” And the law was remarkably effective. In ensuing years, from 1931 to 1946, the total immigration to the United States barely surpassed 50,000 in a 15-year period. The Act would remain in the books of law until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, reopening America’s doors to the world.
In 2024, those same calls from a century ago are echoing down through the halls of history. Some ofthe claims, as then,are legitimate. Some levels of controls are necessary for any state, as resources and jobs are never unlimited in even the most powerful country ever to exist, which the United States has been for the whole of modern history. But now, as then, we are witnessing a fear campaign designed to prey on our most base and paranoid instincts. So, when we are asked to blame the ever-amorphous other for our issues, we are doomed to a world without responsibility. And when we are asked to ignore our collective past—a past built by immigrants from every corner of the world—we are doomed to no future at all.
Thank you for your thoughtful, cogent and coherent summarization of the history of America's struggle with "the other;" and our tendency as Americans to not appreciate that we all come from ancestors who were, at one time, "the other." What I think we are missing in this country is a push to bring resources to all Americans, both the multi-generational members of this country, as well as the new. Instead ,our society pushes consumerism and political pablum over honest debate and goal setting. But after 75 years of TV and fast food, perhaps I am hoping for too much. It will take more than a village; it will take a nation engaging in honest dialogue about values and goals. The question is how to do this in our fractured, instagram society. Best to you