Immigration has central place the history of the United States. It can be said that the USA is the country of immigrants. As the former colony of the British Empire, the USA was built by the hands of the immigrants, so immigration issues were and still are among the top problems in American society. Large cities became the ‘magnets’ for the majority of immigrants, arriving in America at different times.
They became the source of the various issues for immigrants at first and later the source of their power. Evaluating the history of immigrants to the USA, the paper aims at exploring the relevant issues to answer the questions concerning such issues as why many immigrants had settled in large and (mainly) global cities, why established communities (nationals) in many of these cities did respond negatively to new immigrants, and what were the specific things that had been done to limit immigrant settlement.
Immigrants and Large (Global) Cities
The wave of immigration at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century emerged due to the economic and political factors in Southern and Eastern Europe back then. Therefore, most of the immigrants crossed the Atlantic and arrived at the largest ports located in the large and growing cities. Since at least some jobs were available in these cities, immigrants settled there, not moving inside the country’s land to rural areas and work at farms (Hall, 1988; Harvey, 2008; Tonnies, 2005). Competition between immigrants was substantial, but it was a better opportunity to improve life conditions than in the case of the overcrowded Europe with food shortages, total lack of jobs, and religious prosecution as in the case of Russian and Polish Jews at the beginning of the 20th century.
Immigrants, Established Communities, and Limitation Measures
The new waves of immigrants were not welcomed in the established communities. New people in these communities were the competitors for workplaces. The scarcity of jobs available was tremendous, so any new man or woman in such a community was considered as a potential competitor and threat (Tonnies, 2005). The attitude was appropriate.
To limit the immigrant settlement, specific measures were applied (Hall, 1988; Reese, Deverteuil & Thach, 2010). Thus, in 1882, for example, the Chinese Exclusion act was adopted to suspend Chinese immigrants from entering the American land for the next ten years. Additionally, this Act included a variety of socially undesired groups such as lunatics or convicts. Legislative restrictions on immigration were common in the USA until the 1940s.
Immigrants and Power
The immigrants, considering the attitude of the local communities and obvious racism, established their own ethnic groups that eventually evolved into powerful communities. The core of power, in this case, is unity of the interests and the goals, gathering immigrants of one ethnic belonging into one, solid group (Forman, 2000; Low, 2001). Black communities, Latino communities, Chinese communities, and many other have emerged in the years of extensive immigration to the USA.
Conclusion
Summing, the paper has explored the immigration issues and provided the appropriate answers to the questions such as why many immigrants had settled in large and (mainly) global cities, why established communities (nationals) in many of these cities did respond negatively to the new immigrants, and what were the specific things that had been done to limit the immigrant settlement. It appeared that immigration issues were caused by the processes, essential for any establishing and shaping society that adapted to the realities of the changing environment. In other words, immigrants coming to the United States went through a ‘natural selection’, so the strongest and most adaptable overcame all challenges and eventually integrated into American society.
References
Forman, M. (2000). ‘Represent’: Race, space and place in rap music. Popular Music, 19(1), 65-90.
Hall, P. (1988). Cities of tomorrow. An intellectual history of urban planning and design in the twentieth century. London, UK: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 23-40.
Low, S.M. (2001). The edge and the center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear. American Anthropologist, 103(1), 45-56.
Reese, E., Deverteuil, G., & Thach, L. (2010). ‘Weak-center’ gentrification and the contradictions of containment: Deconcentrating poverty in downtown Los Angeles. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(2), 310-327.
Tonnies, F. (2005). Community and society. In J. Lin & C. Mele (Eds), The Urban Sociology Reader (pp. 16-22). New York, NY: Routledge.