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Immigrants In The 1920's

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The United States experienced an influx of immigrants between the 1890’s to the 1920’s. Immigrants entered the United States from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. From these demographic shifts we can also see that there were changed in the United States attitudes towards recent immigrants. These attitudes are grounded in racialized notions of foreign peoples and African Americans. Nativist notions are set in ideas of whiteness and different factors make Eastern Europe and Southern Europe immigrants not quite white.
Nativism is the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants. The nativists were set in their own ideas of whiteness. They favor those who are white and grant those a better set of privileges over others. If you were not white the nativists did not like you. Therefore, if you were …show more content…

Many new immigrants rejected this notion. If you were not an Anglo-Saxon, you were not considered to be white. In Roedeinger’s “Working Towards Whiteness,” he talks about incidents that happened in a couple different place. “In Louisiana and Mississippi, southern Italians learned Jim Crow tardily, even when legally accepted as whites, so much so that native whites fretted and black southerners ‘made unabashed distinctions between Dagoes and white folks’ treating the former with a ‘friendly, first name familiarity.” (p. 96) Rodeninger continues on to talk about how two acts that happened in Mississippi and Louisiana. “In a Mississippi town whites wrecked an Italian American restaurant and drove away its owner after he defied Jim Crow by serving a black customer. After a Louisiana lynching of three Italians in 1896, so many African Americans showed up to mourn that local whites fretted about the possibility of interracial revenge.” (p. 96) Whites in America did not like those who were said to be white in American, but they are not native

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Nativism is described as “the political idea that people who were born in a country are more important than immigrants”( "Nativism Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary"). Nativism was most seen during the 1870’s through the 1920’s. Nativism was a major cause in middle-class disputes since middle-class workers feared that the immigrant workers would drop wage prices and that they “...threatened social stability”(The Many Faces of Immigration). Many Catholic immigrants were blamed for the overflow of immigrants in the poverty sections of cities.

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