The New Immigrants

The periods extending from 1980 to the 1920s in American history was marked by the greatest wave of immigrations where more than 25 million foreigners were reported to have arrived[1]. This era of immigration is viewed as distinct in terms of demography, size, and impacts on the American culture and society forming what is commonly referred to as the “new immigrants”. The bulk of these immigrants are mostly known to have been natives of the Eastern Europe, ethnically and culturally perceived to be quite different from the Britons and Germans who had constituted the bulk of the earlier immigrants into the United States. This group of immigrants is referred to as “new” because it came from areas that had not traditionally been known to supply settlers to the U.S, such as Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, Japan, and China[2].

The new immigrants brought about anxieties among the whites who saw the Asian and Eastern Europe immigrants as far more racially different and inassimilable[3]. They feared that they would undermine Protestantism and democracy. Most critics also blamed the new immigrants for increase in crime rates, being un-American in their family lives, language, religion, and for concentrating in towns and cities where their votes were machine controlled. Many of these immigrants were subjected to dire poverty and residential segregation forcing them to take up jobs under poor conditions and wages. Labor organizers complained that large inflows of new workers into the country undermined wages.  In the mainstream press, communism, anarchism, and socialism were depicted as alien political values brought over from foreign lands[4].

As much as the new immigrants arrived in great numbers, they similarly departed in large numbers unlike the earlier immigrants.[5] Mostly male and young had one major goal, to earn enough money in their temporary stay in America to afford an increased standard of living on return home. Between 50 to 80 percent of the new immigrants are believed to have returned home eventually. The development of the large, thriving immigrant communities generated backlash among native-born Americans that they were losing their cities to the “undesirable: newcomers

List of References

 

Dalla, Rochelle L. 2008. Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families : Implications for Research, Education, Policy, and Service. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

Hall, Matthew. “Residential Integration on the New Frontier: Immigrant Segregation in Established and New Destinations.”Demography 50, no. 5 (October 2013): 1873-1896.

[1] Hall, Matthew. “Residential Integration on the New Frontier: Immigrant Segregation in Established and New Destinations.”Demography 50, no. 5 (October 2013): 1873-1896.

 

[2] Dalla, Rochelle L. 2008. Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families : Implications for Research, Education, Policy, and Service. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

 

[3] Hall, Matthew, 2013

[4] Dalla, Rochelle L. 2008. Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families : Implications for Research, Education, Policy, and Service. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.

 

[5] Hall, Matthew. “Residential Integration on the New Frontier: Immigrant Segregation in Established and New Destinations.”Demography 50, no. 5 (October 2013): 1873-1896.

 

[6] Dalla, Rochelle L. 2008.

 

 

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