The immigration history of the united states

It's often said that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Our immigration history starts back, really, in pre-history, as the "indigenous" peoples of the Americas actually immigrated from Asia, crossing a land-bridge between Siberia and the US state of Alaska. So not even the native Americans are actually native.

That said, for historical purposes the real immigration history of the united states begins with the Pilgrims and Puritans of the seventeenth century. This first wave of immigrants were religious refugees from Europe, fleeing religious persecution in England, Germany, France and other regions. The irony of this chapter of immigration history is that they then constructed exactly what they were running from, in turn persecuting the American indians they encountered as well as other, newer immigrant groups that had different cultures and religious practices themselves.

Of course, the numbers of immigrants coming to the Americas from Europe in this era was relatively small when compared with what was to come. The era of "Mass Migration", as it is called, roughly coincided with the industrial revolution and began in the 1820s. America.gov has a section on it in which they put the numbers into persepctive:

This period ushered in the first era of mass migration. From that decade through the 1880s, about 15 million immigrants made their way to the United States, many choosing agriculture in the Midwest and Northeast, while others flocked to cities like New York, Ph iladelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.

Factors in both Europe and the United States shaped this transition. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe liberated young men from military service back home at the same time that industrialization and agricultural consolidation in England, Scandinavia, and much of central Europe transformed local economies and created a class of young people who could not earn a living in the new order. Demand for immigrant labor shot up with two major developments: the settlement of the American Midwest after the inauguration of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the related rise of the port of New York, and the first stirrings of industrial development in the United States, particularly in textile production, centered in New England.

Some of the immigrant communities that flourished during this time were the Germans, who still make up the largest ethnic base in the United States. This also was the origin of the Irish immigration history of the US, with Irish settling primarily in the cities of New York and Boston. Italian, Eastern European and Jewish waves of immigration were to follow, all the way up to the Mexican and Chinese mass immigration waves of today.

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