Waves of immigration
Irish, Germans, then Italians, Jews, Poles and others, and after 1965 Latin Americans and Asians, remake the country, each wave meeting both welcome and backlash.
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
The first great wave came in the 1840s and 1850s, when Irish fleeing famine and Germans fleeing hard times and failed revolutions arrived in their millions. Their Catholicism provoked a nativist backlash, the “Know-Nothing” movement. From the 1880s to 1914 came a still larger wave from southern and eastern Europe, including Italians, Poles, Greeks and Jews escaping pogroms, many processed through New York’s Ellis Island (1892–1954), while Chinese immigrants were barred outright by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By 1890 almost 15% of the population was foreign-born.
- Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life — Roger Daniels, HarperCollins (1990)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The Immigration Act of 1924 set national quotas designed to keep the country mostly northern European, and immigration slowed to a trickle for four decades.
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
- Mexican Immigrants in the United States — Migration Policy Institute (2024)
- Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America — Mae M. Ngai, Princeton University Press (2004)
Why it matters today
"A nation of immigrants" is a core American self-image, and most Americans can tell you where their family came from. Yet every generation has also fought over who belongs. Today about one in seven people in the country was born abroad, and immigration is among the most divisive political issues.