Immigration is not a marginal theme in American history; it has been a crucial axis of America’s distinctive development from the very beginning. All Americans, except Native Americans, had at one time been strangers to the land they now claimed as their own. The process of social re-mixing eventually yielded a new society, less provincial, less narrowly devoted than the ones the immigrants had left behind.
Immigrant diversity made America different, not in colorful little ways, but in large ways that were essential to its development. Americans had to learn to live with many cultures, many versions of truth. The unsettling process shook millions free from their homelands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, churning them from the lands of northern and western Europe. In the 1870s more than 280,000 newcomers a year, mostly from Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, and the Scandinavian countries of western and northern Europe entered the United States. Only a decade later, “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe accounted for the bulk of the twenty-three million immigrants from Europe, the largest migration in history, who came crowding into America’s ports between 1880 and 1920. These immigrants brought to their new land much valuable experience and important gifts, but to longer-settled Americans their cultures, languages, and folkways were strange and threatening. Their diversity contributed to the evolution of American liberty. And like other immigrants before them, they peopled the land, pushed back its frontiers, built its cities, laid its tracks, worked its factories, and enriched its cultures.
TCTH Lesson Plans
- Waves, Walls, and Windows: US Immigration Policy, 1790–1986 (High School)
- Civic Engagement Project Pacing Guidance
Timeline
Online Exhibition
AllSides News
The Gilder Lehrman Institute has worked with AllSides.com to pull up current articles in the news media related to this topic written from different perspectives.
Click on the “Latest News” below to access the AllSides page on this topic.
The articles shown here update regularly, so if you find articles that you are particularly interested in sharing with your students, keep track of the links to the original publications.
Additional Gilder Lehrman Resources
Essays
-
“Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City” by Vincent J. Cannato
-
“‘The New Colossus’: Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience” by Julie Des Jardins
-
“The 1965 Immigration Act: Opening the Nation to Immigrants of Color” by Tom Gjelten
-
“Immigrants and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798” by Terri Diane Halperin
-
“The History of US Immigration Laws: What Students Should Know” by Jane Hong
-
“Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity” by Phillip Lopate
-
“Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies” by Rubén G. Rumbaut
-
“The Dillingham Commission and the ‘Immigration Question,’ 1907−1921” by Robert Zeidel
Spotlights on Primary Sources
Online Exhibitions, Timelines, and Quizzes
Videos
-
“The Quest for Equality: European Immigration, Part 1” by Matthew Jacobson
-
“The Quest for Equality: European Immigration, Part 2” by Matthew Jacobson