ANGEL G RIVERA RODRIGUEZ

[Company address]

IMMIGRATION TO THE
UNITED STATES
[Document subtitle]

Table of Contents
Immigrants Background.....................................................................................................2
Reasons for Immigration....................................................................................................3
Immigration's impact in the United States.........................................................................3
Industrial Revolution..........................................................................................................4
Irish and German Immigrants............................................................................................4

IMMIGRATION TO THE
UNITED STATES
IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
Immigrants Background
The United States is sometimes called the "Nation of Immigrants" because it
has received more immigrants than any other country in history. During the first
one hundred years of US history, the nation had no immigration laws. Immigration
began to climb during the 1830s. "Between 1830-1840, 44% of the immigrants
came from Ireland, 30% came from Germany, 15% came from Great Britain, and the
remainder came from other European countries."

The movement to America of millions of immigrants in the century after the

1820s was not simply a flight of impoverished peasants abandoning
underdeveloped, backward regions for the riches and unlimited opportunities
offered by the American economy. People did not move randomly to America but
emanated from very specific regions at specific times in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. "It is impossible to understand even the nature of American
immigrant communities without appreciating the nature of the world these
newcomers left."
The rate of people leaving Ireland was extremely high in the late 1840s and
early 1850s due to overpopulation and to the potato famine of 1846. "By 1850,
there were almost one million Irish Catholics in the United States, especially
clustered in New York and Massachusetts."
Germans left their homeland due to severe depression, unemployment,
political unrest, and the failure of the liberal revolutionary movement. It was not
only the poor people who left their countries, but those in the middle and lowermiddle levels of their social structures also left. "Those too poor could seldom
afford to go, and the very wealthy had too much of a stake in the homelands to
depart."

Reasons for Immigration

Many immigrants came to America as a result of the lure of new land, in part,
the result of the attraction of the frontier. America was in a very real sense the last
frontier--a land of diverse peoples that, even under the worst conditions, maintained
a way of life that permitted more freedom of belief and action than was held abroad.
"While this perception was not entirely based in reality, it was the conviction that

was often held in Europe and that became part of the ever-present American
Dream."

Immigration's impact in the United States

The opportunity to directly transfer a skill into the American economy
was great for newcomers prior to the 1880s. "Coal-mining and steelproducing companies in the East, railroads, gold- and silver-mining interests
in the West, and textile mills in New England all sought a variety of ethnic
groups as potential sources of inexpensive labor." Because immigrants were
eager to work, they contributed to the wealth of the growing nation. During
the 1830s, American textile mills welcomed hand-loom weavers from
England and North Ireland whose jobs had been displaced by power looms.
It was this migration that established the fine-cotton-goods trade of
Philadelphia. "Nearly the entire English silk industry migrated to America
after the Civil War, when high American tariffs allowed the industry to
prosper on this side of the Atlantic."
Whether immigrants were recruited directly for their abilities or
followed existing networks into unskilled jobs, they inevitably moved within
groups of friends and relatives and worked and lived in clusters.

Industrial Revolution
As the Industrial Revolution progressed, immigrants were enticed to
come to the United States through the mills and factories that sent
representatives overseas to secure cheap labor. An example was the

Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, located along the banks of the

Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire. In the 1870s, the
Amoskeag Company recruited women from Scotland who were expert
gingham weavers. Agreements were set specifying a fixed period of time
during which employees would guarantee to work for the company.

Irish and German Immigrants

In the 1820s, Irish immigrants did most of the hard work in building the
canals in the United States. In fact, Irish immigrants played a large role in
building the Erie Canal. American contractors encouraged Irish immigrants
to come to the United States to work on the roads, canals, and railroads, and
manufacturers lured them into the new mills and factories.
"Most German immigrants settled in the middle western states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri." With encouragement to move west
from the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered public land free to
immigrants who intended to become citizens, German immigrants comprised
a large portion of the pioneers moving west. "They were masterful farmers
and they built prosperous farms."