19th Century Immigration

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The United States was a hotspot during the late 19th century for immigrant desiring the American Dream, and looking for a golden opportunity to better life. “Between 1870 and 1900, “American fever” swept the globe, as over 11 million immigrants arrived in the United States, more than in the previous 250 years” (Schaller, et al. 619). This group of immigrants came from various parts of the world. And their reasons for coming to America vary from either getting away from their previous location, or due to the vast innovations and opportunities that America had available to offer them. One of the major innovations drawing immigrants to the United States was the the technological innovation of the steamship, making long-distance travel much easier …show more content…

Some groups who migrated to the United States were because of religious discrimination, and felt they no longer were apart of their society. This brought Eastern European Jews to America. Jews were forced to live with severe restrictions and suffered severe attacks on their villages, which then later let to the Jews being wrongly accused for the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Most immigrants who came to the United Stated faced discrimination so the majority of the jobs handed to them when they got here were lower wages working on the farm lands or working the dangerous unskilled factory jobs that the “whites” didn’t really …show more content…

The economic reasons as to why 70% of the immigrants settled in cities when most has come form agricultural/village backgrounds was because they felt that they were unable to maintain themselves in an overpopulated countryside, and didn’t want to continue to compete with mechanized agriculture. So, those crossing over to the United States settled in the bigger cities because that’s where the jobs were. The social aspect of why the majority of those immigrants moved to the big cities was because normally they could find those with the same ethnicity as they were in the bigger cities. With that being said most of the immigrants felt more at home when they found others who were of the same ethnicity, and in doing so this allowed immigrants to speak their indigenous language. It also allowed the immigrants to remain accustomed to their culture and continue their