Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Distinguish old immigration from new immigration by region of origin, religion, and primary destination, and explain why nativists treated the post-1880 wave as a different category rather than a continuation of the older flow.
• Account for the push and pull factors that produced the new immigration, including European poverty and a long agricultural depression, religious persecution such as the Russian pogroms, political instability in central Europe, and the pull of American industrial wages and family chain migration.
• Identify the principal federal arrival stations of the period, distinguishing the Atlantic processing function of Ellis Island after 1892 from the detention and exclusion function of Angel Island after 1910.
• Describe the ethnic enclaves that immigrants built in industrial cities, including Little Italy, the Lower East Side Jewish quarter, the Polish parishes of Chicago, and the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, and explain how those neighborhoods opened cultural opportunities while sharpening debates over Americanization.
• Account for the early Great Migration of African Americans out of the South to railroad and packinghouse jobs in the urban North, and situate the Exoduster movement of 1879 to 1880 inside the larger story of late nineteenth century migration.
• Explain the role of the settlement house movement, especially Hull House under Jane Addams from 1889, in mediating between immigrant neighborhoods and the institutions of American urban life.

The numbers are the place to start. Between 1880 and 1920, the United States admitted roughly twenty-three million immigrants, the largest peacetime migration in the country's history and the largest sustained transfer of European population the world had ever seen. The federal census of 1890 already counted one foreign-born resident for every seven people in the country, and the 1900 census raised that ratio to one in eight as the new immigrants kept coming. The pre-1880s flow had been dominated by Irish escaping the potato famine, Germans escaping the failures of 1848, British craft workers, and Scandinavian farmers headed for the upper Midwest. Most of those arrivals had been Protestant or Catholic and had spoken languages that Anglo-American teachers and clerks could at least recognize. The post-1880 flow looked entirely different. Italians from the desperately poor villages of the Mezzogiorno, Poles from the Russian and Austrian partitions, Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms of the western provinces of the empire, Greeks from the Peloponnese, and Slavic peoples from a dozen languages and three empires arrived speaking tongues no public school had ever taught and practicing Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish religions that fit no existing American congregation (KC-6.2.I.A).

The push factors were structural. The European agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, driven by competition from American grain and the long fall in commodity prices, made survival impossible on small southern Italian or Polish landholdings. Religious persecution drove the Russian Jewish departures: after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 the Russian Empire imposed a long string of antisemitic May Laws and tolerated waves of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement that killed thousands and burned out shtetl economies across what is now Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and eastern Poland. Political instability in the Balkans and the slow disintegration of the Hapsburg lands pushed Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, and other South Slavic peoples toward the Atlantic ports of Hamburg, Bremen, and Trieste. The pull factors were just as concrete. Industrial wages in American steel mills, garment shops, meatpacking plants, and anthracite mines averaged two to three times what the same labor earned in southern or eastern Europe. Family chain migration mattered: an earlier arrival paid passage for a brother, then a wife, then a village priest. By 1900, Italian villages in Sicily and Calabria emptied themselves into specific Brooklyn or Cleveland neighborhoods, and the cultural pull of an urban America that already had a working Italian parish or a Yiddish theater on the next block drew families across an ocean (KC-6.2.I.A).

Ellis Island opened in New York Harbor on the first day of 1892, replacing the older state-run Castle Garden facility and becoming the first federal Atlantic arrival station. Federal inspectors at Ellis processed the steerage passengers of every Atlantic liner that landed at New York, the dominant port for the new immigration. The processing was quick by modern standards, a matter of hours rather than days, and roughly ninety-eight percent of arrivals were admitted. Medical inspection lines, literacy questions where required, and the famous chalk-mark codes on coats sorted the entrants into the admitted, the held, and the very small fraction returned. Angel Island opened in San Francisco Bay in 1910 as the western counterpart, but its purpose was different. Because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had already closed the Pacific gate to Chinese laborers, Angel functioned mainly as a detention and exclusion station. Asian arrivals routinely waited weeks or months in barracks while inspectors interrogated them about ancestral villages, family relationships, and merchant status. The poetry that detainees carved into the walls of the men's barracks at Angel Island survives as one of the most haunting primary sources of the period (KC-6.2.I.A).

Settlement was geographic. Italians clustered in lower Manhattan around Mulberry Street in what reporters called Little Italy, then spread to East Harlem and Brooklyn. Russian and Polish Jews built the densest urban neighborhood in the western world on the Lower East Side, where census enumerators in 1900 counted more than seven hundred people per acre on some blocks of the Tenth Ward. Polish, Slovak, and Bohemian immigrants built parish-centered neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago around the steel mills and packinghouses, with the Polish national church at St. Stanislaus Kostka anchoring one of the largest Polish populations outside Warsaw. Chinese laborers excluded from new entry after 1882 consolidated the existing Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York as defensive bachelor enclaves, since the exclusion law had also barred most Chinese women from joining male relatives. Mexican migrants moved freely across the largely unfortified southwestern border to work the cotton fields of Texas, the copper mines of Arizona, and the railroad sections of New Mexico and southern California, building barrios in El Paso, Los Angeles, and the smaller agricultural towns of the Imperial and Rio Grande valleys. Each enclave opened cultural opportunities for its residents, with foreign-language newspapers, mutual aid societies, and ethnic congregations, even as the same enclaves intensified public debates over assimilation and Americanization (KC-6.2.I.B).

The industrial economy that drew the immigrants in turn was reshaped by them. The industrial workforce grew, and it grew more diverse through both internal and international migration (KC-6.1.II.B.ii). By 1900, foreign-born workers and their American-born children accounted for roughly half of all manufacturing employment in the country and a substantially higher fraction in the heavy industries: more than three quarters of the steelworkers in Pittsburgh, more than four fifths of the garment workers in New York, and roughly the same in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. Italian and Slavic men did the dangerous unskilled labor inside the steel mills; Russian Jewish women and girls carried the needle trades inside Lower East Side tenement workshops; Polish and Czech butchers manned the disassembly lines of Packingtown. The same industrial demand that pulled the immigrants in turned the new immigration into the muscle of the second industrial revolution, even as it concentrated the human cost of industrial work onto people who could not yet vote.

African American migration belongs in the same chapter, even though its main movement was still a generation away. The Exoduster movement of 1879 to 1880 brought as many as fifty thousand formerly enslaved people from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee into Kansas in the years just after the end of Reconstruction, fleeing the violence of redeemer governments and chasing the promise of homestead land. The numbers were modest beside the Atlantic flow, but the social meaning was outsized: the Exodusters were the first large voluntary movement of African Americans out of the cotton South. Across the 1880s and 1890s, smaller streams of Black workers moved to the railroad shops of Kansas City, the packinghouses of St. Louis and Chicago, the steel furnaces of Pittsburgh, and the domestic-service economies of Cleveland and Detroit. The full Great Migration would not pour into the North until the labor shortages of the First World War, but its first stirrings were already audible in the late nineteenth century, and the CED treats African American migration both within and out of the South as part of the same Period 6 urbanizing pattern (KC-6.2.I.A).

The neighborhoods drew their own institutional response. The settlement house movement, imported from Toynbee Hall in London's East End, established middle-class residence-and-service institutions inside immigrant urban districts. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889 as the most famous American example. Hull House offered English classes, a kindergarten, a public bath, a labor museum that taught the children of immigrants the craft traditions their parents had carried from southern Italy or the Russian Pale, and a steady stream of empirical investigation that fed Addams's books and Florence Kelley's factory inspection work. Lillian Wald opened the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side in 1893 and built it into the model for visiting nursing in the country. By 1900, more than a hundred settlement houses had been founded in American cities, most of them staffed by college-educated women who used the institution to invent the field of professional social work. The settlements opened a politically modest but practically consequential channel between the immigrant neighborhood and the institutions of the larger American city.

The arrival was not unopposed. Lesson 9 will pick up the political response in detail. Here it is enough to mark that nativist organizations such as the American Protective Association rose alongside the new immigration, that the Immigration Restriction League pushed for a literacy test from 1894 forward, and that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had already established the principle that the federal government could close a national gate. The longer arc of restriction, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that effectively ended the new immigration, belongs to Period 7. What Topic 6.8 fixes is the demographic transformation itself: the shift in origin, the building of urban enclaves, the start of African American migration, and the institutional mediation of the settlement house movement.

The five sources below sample the demographic, the literary, the visual, the legal, and the institutional dimensions of the new immigration. Use any three for an in-class document set; use all five for a full DBQ rehearsal.

1. (Continuity and Change) Distinguish old immigration from new immigration along three axes: region of origin, religion, and primary destination inside the United States. Which of the three differences mattered most for how nativists received the new arrivals, and on what grounds?
2. (Causation) Account for the push and pull factors that produced the new immigration. Which mattered more for the Russian Jewish departures: the persecution that drove them out, or the industrial demand that drew them in? Defend the choice with at least two pieces of specific evidence.
3. (Comparison) Compare the federal function of Ellis Island after 1892 with the federal function of Angel Island after 1910. What does the comparison reveal about how the federal arrival apparatus treated Atlantic and Pacific arrivals as different categories of human being?
4. (Causation) The settlement house movement, with Hull House as its model, claimed to mediate between immigrant neighborhoods and the institutions of American urban life. Account for at least two services that Hull House provided and explain how each connected to a specific feature of the new immigration documented in this lesson.
5. (Continuity and Change) Place the early Great Migration of African Americans alongside the European new immigration. In what sense are they the same story, and in what sense are they different stories? Account for the structural similarities and the structural differences.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.