This also was the first great period of Asian immigration to America, mostly from China but with a trickle of immigrants from Japan and Korea as well. However, anti-Asian feeling in the western United States limited both the extent of Asian immigration and the degree to which the Asian immigrants could take full advantage of the opportunities available to their white neighbours.
The growth of immigration in this period was spurred, as were so many other social phenomena, by technology. The development of ocean-going steamships and the rise of a great trans-oceanic trade spanning the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans made it possible for tens of thousands of men, women, and children to seek a new life in America and, despite the lure of the large eastern cities, to spread out across the continent to do so. Moreover, the rise of American industries and the growth of the railroad system created thousands of jobs, both in factories and in the construction trades that offered powerful inducements to prospective immigrants seeking a new life.
As already mentioned during this last wave of immigration most of the immigrants were Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and eastern European Jews. For the Jews, religious oppression as well as economic reasons impelled their emigration. From 1901 to 1910, the greatest decade of immigration in U.S. history, nearly 8.8 million people migrated. Of these, more than 70 percent were from southern and eastern Europe. New York City was the favoured destination of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1910, when nearly 2 million residents, about 40 percent of the population, were foreign-born. Other eastern coastal cities, including Boston, were also first homes of immigrants. Some of the immigrants moved inland, swelling the populations of cities such as Pittsburgh and Chicago. Others, more adventurous, crossed the country, settling at places along the way or on the West Coast.
So great was the flow of people to the United States during this period that in some cities a majority of the population was made up of immigrants and their children. In New York City, one could walk for blocks hearing a variety of foreign languages and seeing newsstands filled with foreign-language newspapers. Few Asians arrived in the United States until the mid-1800. The growth of California after the discovery of gold in 1848 and the need for laborers to help build the transcontinental railroad spurred Chinese immigration. Japanese first arrived in the United States in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Most of the Japanese, as well as many Chinese, came as contract workers to farms on the West Coast or to plantations in Hawaii. Filipinos, from what was then the newly acquired U.S. territory of the Philippines, and other Asians also arrived in the United States during these years. As strangers in a new land, many of the immigrants faced a difficult period of adjustment. Most immigrants tended to settle where people from the same country had established themselves earlier. Churches and clubs were often gathering places for people of the same ethnic origin. The rapid growth of foreign-language newspapers helped non-English-speaking newcomers to understand American ways. Public schools, in particular, encouraged the children of immigrants to adapt to American life.
During these years more and more native-born Americans believed the swelling flood of immigrants threatened the nation's unity. Hostility which firstly aroused against the Chinese in the 1870's now turned against Jews, Roman Catholics, Japanese, and, finally, the new immigrants in general. The late nineteenth century exhibited various forms of discrimination against immigrants. Organized labour tried to prevent the factory employment of unnaturalized foreigners, while New York charged immigrants $20 for a hunting license compared with the $1 it charged citizens. The Immigration Restriction League joined labour officials to fight competition from cheap immigrant workers. Nevertheless, these kinds of leagues proved unsuccessful in curbing the massive late nineteenth century immigration. The anti-immigration leagues failed in large part because of the political clout of manufacturers. Manufactures valued immigrants because they wanted the cheap labor immigrants provided. Even the Chinese, who were excluded from immigrating by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1882, received praise from railroad Robber-Baron Leland Stanford for being diligent workers able to survive on very low wages. The result of the fairly free immigration policy, pushed by big corporations in search of cheap labor, resulted in a more ethnically diverse America by the end of the nineteenth century. The US was transforming into a multi-ethnic society during the era, but as the treatment of blacks in the South and the exclusion of Chinese immigrants show, it was not yet ready to become a multi-racial society. Along with providing cheap labor to the corporations, the ethnic diversity immigration caused helped manufacturers in yet another way. Because American workers were from so many different ethnic backgrounds, worker groups always found it difficult to unify. While socialism and communism began to gain strong footholds in European industrial countries, the ethnically diverse American working class found cooperation difficult. Although this period saw multiple working-class movements, they were never as unified as in other countries. Labor Unions were relatively weaker in the US than they were abroad, a fact the new corporations in the US exploited, an easy task in a country dominated by pro-business courts.
As we can see although immigration was one of the prime forces that shaped the American people, Americans always have been ambivalent about the virtues and advantages of immigration. Those who already had roots here have often resented those who sought to join them. In part, this was simply an expression of the fear that newcomers might not only outstrip those who were already there in achievement but even exclude them from the fruits of economic and social success. In part, anti-immigrant feeling is has been closely linked to religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice. In few periods of American history were these prejudices as evident as in the late nineteenth century. One way in which these prejudices found expression was the belief that the "new immigrants," coming as they did from despotic monarchies, were incapable of understanding democracy, living by it, or taking part in it. It was in partial response to these fears that the nation's public schools assumed the burden of training potential citizens as well as educating pupils. For millions of immigrant children, the public schools were the first real contact they had with America; the impulse to become "real Americans" became a driving force in immigrant families, and the process of what social scientists began to call "Americanization" worked in most families through school-age children upward.
The decades before and after 1900 have also been a period of enormous transformation in the physical locations of Americans. From the first settlements through the end of the Civil War, the United States was largely a rural, agricultural nation and in the decades preceding and during the Civil War the nation's cities grew in pace with the growth of industry. However, in the 1890s, the United States was transformed from an agrarian to an industrial nation. This time period marks the birth of modern America when this country becomes the largest economy in the world and the most modern urban nation. The 1890 industrial revolution was centered in the United States and Germany and featured a wealth of inventions in the production of metals, machinery, agricultural products and chemicals. The United States had begun a period of rapid industrial expansion, demanding a ready supply of cheap, unskilled, and semiskilled labor for factories and mines. For these employees the hours of work were long and dangerous, and the wages were low, but compared to what many immigrants had left behind, this “land of opportunity” was a blessing. Therefore, when in 1880 the new wave of immigrants began to arrive in the United States, they moved to American cities, not to the countryside as immigrants had for 250 years. The migration affected most regions of the country to some extent, but the greatest impact was felt in the cities and industrial towns of the north-east and mid-west, where the new migrants took over the poorer sections that had previously been occupied by the Irish. Immigrants took jobs in the new industries in the new cities and each group of immigrants tended to concentrate in different industries: Poles, Slovaks and Hungarians in mining and heavy industry, Russians and Polish Jews in the garment trade, Italians in construction work or, along with the Portuguese, in textiles. By the turn of the century the character of urban life had radically changed, with the cities both growing and becoming far more diverse. The cities grew at a massive pace, some of them doubling in size every decade. In 1870 only about a quarter of the US population lived in settlements over 2500 people; by 1917 the proportion was approaching half. By the 1920 census, the urban and rural populations were equal in size, but the rural share would continue to drop for the rest of the twentieth century.
Cities became the location of most of American life.Politically, culturally and economically, the action moved from the countryside to the city streets.
The worst evil of this disproportionate urban expansion was the growth of the slum. The slum problem dated back to the late 1840s when, to accommodate the immigrant influx into eastern seaport cities, enterprising landlords began to convert old mansions and warehouses into tenements. Conditions deteriorated still further with the invention in 1879 of the “dumbbell tenement”, where grim, unsanitary barracks often without direct light, air or drainage were shelter of many immigrant families. Not surprisingly these places had the highest death-rates. Poverty compelled most of the immigrants to live in slums. Every large American city had its congested immigrant districts, but New York’s Lower East Side, with its huge concentration of Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians provided the most notorious example. In these areas, mainly because of urban lawlessness, crime increased alarmingly, and the American murder-rate more than quadrupled between 1881 and 1889.
As the slums developed in the cities, new technologies like the Cable Car and the Trolley allowed the city to grow into a larger sprawl. This made it possible for the middle and upper classes that worked in the city to live further away and commute from the growing suburbs. The moving of the upper and middle classes only added to the poverty of the cities. And because these upper classes were generally native rather than immigrant, the cities became predominantly immigrant.
However, the American cities benefited greatly from the diversity of their population. Different racial and ethnic groups gifted the country in a variety of ways. From the English, came the gift of democracy. From Africans, came art, music, poetry, and inventions. Mexican Americans contributed ranching, Spanish architecture, salsa, and irrigation. Native Americans gifted the nation with many of the crops that now feed American citizens, a sense of respect for the environment, and spiritual sensitivity. Immigrants have made enormous contributions to the culture and economy of the United States. But their accomplishments have been made with great difficulty as their living and working conditions have been precarious in most of the cases. Also, at times, the United States has restricted immigration to maintain a more homogeneous society in which all the people share similar ethnic, geographic, and cultural background. Although some immigration laws have been relaxed, still today many new immigrants of different backgrounds face challenges in gaining acceptance to the United States.
Returning to the idea of the “melting pot”, as far as a preference for assimilation or pluralism is concerned, immigrant thinking varies. In an ideal world, the two would coexist, enabling newcomers to continue to observe the cultural practices that sustained their communities in their country of origin, and at the same time that they participate in American society in a productive way.