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Immigration was a difficult subject in the US because the US had always been seen as a land of opportunity for those seeking a fresh start; the first colonists in North America came to start a new life. The US became synonymous with opportunity and freedom, which was attractive and many people immigrated steadily to the US from the time it became a country to the 1920s. However, many of the first families were upset by new immigrants coming in, especially as the US filled up and the growing population centered around cities for work. The 1920s brought legislation which extremely limited the amount of European immigrants the US would admit every year, changing how the US population was growing, and how the US was viewed. The "nativists," citizens who believed the immigrants did not belong in the US, and factory workers supported the change because they felt immigrants were a threat, especially to unionizing and striking workers. This change, however, was bad for businesses looking for replacement workers during strikes and cheap labor, and allowing much fewer immigrants would hurt how the US was viewed by other countries, and the diversity of the population.

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Immigrant men working in a textile mill.

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Before the war, many immigrants were facing similar hostilities, while they had been a blessing to the economy in the Gilded Age. The influx of immigrants after the Civil War allowed for cheap labor in new textile mills, the railroads, and other industries that were appearing. These workers drove the industrial revolution in the US, and kept pushing the US forward. However, once the original set of workers became frustrated with poor working conditions, new immigrants hampered their efforts to reform labor standards by doing the work the striking workers left for often lower wages. Immigrants also brought diverse cultures and Catholicism, both of which the old population did not want to accept into American culture. For example, in California, where many Chinese immigrants had settled, other immigrants and the working population felt so threatened by their presence that they managed to get the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed, which stopped Chinese immigration to the US temporarily. Immigrants, as crucial as they were to economic success, were looked down upon and generally disliked.

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Immigrants wait in line at Ellis Island.

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What did it mean to be a citizen in the 1920s?

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What did it mean to be a citizen in the 1920s?

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In the 1920s, most immigrants were not seen as proper citizens, and were instead seen as "hyphenated Americans," or less than the average American citizen. They had trouble during prohibition as European countries had had alcohol and places you could get it, which built a sense of community they could not replicate in the "dry" US. Russian immigrants felt a lot of hate and were targeted during the Red Scare, fearing deportation for being accused of being a communist. Similarly, German immigrants were finally escaping a period of hate during WWI, as many citizens felt strongly about the war effort. The "native" US citizens were quick to mistrust any newer immigrants, especially of lower class, and did not welcome them into the American culture. Immigrants were seen more as labor than as citizens, and even in working they were still hated by workers that were part of unions, and often could not join unions because of language barriers.

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After the 1920s, during the great depression, the most pressing issues for the country were getting the economy back on track, but immigrants still had a hard time. As so much of the work force was jobless, the competition for jobs was brutal, and often immigrants, especially minorities and those who weren't white had even more difficulty than white workers who had been in the US longer. Immigration was restricted even further, for the good of the economy and Americans already living in the US. However, immigration would increase again with the start of WWII, as many Europeans would go to the US in an attempt to avoid the war.

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During the Gilded Age there were a large number of immigrants that were coming to North America. During the Gilded Age there were around 11.7 million people that came to America. From those 11.7 million immigrants10.6 million of those immigrants came from Europe, which made up 90 percent of the immigration population. The Canadians made up 6.7 percent and then the Chinese made up 1.7 percent. From all these immigrants that came a lot of them first came to bigger cities. When they first arrived they usually had nothing expect the clothes that they had on their backs and maybe some pocket change that wasn't really enough to do anything with.

The large migration of immigrants to North America allowed for a huge rise in the U.S. economy. Lots of factories started up in large cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Most of the immigrants that took these factory jobs started in the lowest level. Even though some immigrants did know how to run the machinery in the factories from the old country they still had to take the hardest and most difficult jobs possible. The wages were super low and the hours were very unreasonable. It was not uncommon for a person to work more then 12 hours a day and have to work 6 days a week. The working conditions were also very dangerous and not well taken care of. Lots of the people that worked in these factories had fingers crushed or completely cut off. Sometimes people would even lose their limbs because of the terrible working conditions. Even Historian Carl Wittke's phrased, " we who built America." For the unappreciated immigrant workers that worked for terrible wages and horrible working conditions.

During this time Immigrants didn't really have a word in what they wanted because they were thought of uneducated people that didn't know what they wanted. They were treated badly and disrespected. They didn't speak the language that their bosses spoke so they were treated differently. When they didn't reach their daily quota they would be deducted from their pay. They were also not allowed to go to the bathroom until their lunch breaks. They were made to work with people from other nationalities so that they couldn't speak to someone because they didn't know the same language. This also made it so that the immigrants wouldn't try to rally together and try to make strikes against the company because they couldn't communicate with each other. Soon after all this labor unions started to form. These unions started to organize strikes and protests against factories for shorter hours and better pay. They also wanted to stop child labor from happening. But one of the problems with the strikes and protest were that they would lose their jobs to other immigrants that needed the work. Because of all these things happening at the same time the middle class started to form and people started to get paid more and were able to live more comfortably.

Sources:

Daniels, Roger. 1999. "Immigration in the Gilded Age: Change or Continuity?". OAH Magazine of History 13 (4). [Oxford University Press, Organization of American Historians]: 21-25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163306.

Poddar, Ankur. "Working and Living Conditions." The Industrial Revolution. Accessed May 03, 2016. http://firstindustrialrevolution.weebly.com/working-and-living-conditions.html.

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During the Gilded Age there were a large number of immigrants that were coming to North America. During the Gilded Age there were around 11.7 million people that came to America. From those 11.7 million immigrants10.6 million of those immigrants came from Europe, which made up 90 percent of the immigration population.

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On the Great Plains, environmental catastrophe deepened America's longstanding agricultural crisis and magnified the tragedy of the Depression. Beginning in 1932, severe droughts hit from Texas to the Dakotas and lasted until at least 1936. The droughts compounded years of agricultural mismanagement. To grow their crops, Plains farmers had plowed up natural ground cover that had taken ages to form over the surface of the dry Plains states. Relatively wet decades had protected them, but, during the early 1930s, without rain, the exposed fertile topsoil turned to dust, and without sod or windbreaks such as trees, rolling winds churned the dust into massive storms that blotted out the sky, choked settlers and livestock, and rained dirt not only across the region but as far east as Washington, D.C., New England, and ships on the Atlantic Ocean. The "Dust Bowl," as the region became known, exposed all-too-late the need for conservation. The region's farmers, already hit by years of foreclosures and declining commodity prices, were decimated. For many in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas who were "baked out, blown out, and broke," their only hope was to travel west to California, whose rains still brought bountiful harvests and-potentially-jobs for farmworkers. It was an exodus. Oklahoma lost 440,000 people, or a full 18.4 percent of its 1930 population, to out-migration.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother became one of the most enduring images of the "Dust Bowl" and the ensuing westward exodus. Lange, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, captured the image at migrant farmworker camp in Nipomo, California, in 1936. In the photograph a young mother stares out with a worried, weary expression. She a migrant, having left her home in Oklahoma to follow the crops in the Golden State. She took part in what many in the mid-1930s were beginning to recognize as a vast migration of families out of the southwestern plains states. In the image she cradles an infant and supports two older children, who cling to her. Lange's photo encapsulated the nation's struggle. The subject of the photograph seemed used to hard work but down on her luck, and uncertain about what the future might hold.

The "Okies," as such westward migrants were disparagingly called by their new neighbors, were the most visible group many who were on the move during the Depression, lured by news and rumors of jobs in far flung regions of the country. By 1932 sociologists were estimating that millions of men were on the roads and rails travelling the country. Economists sought to quantify the movement of families from the Plains. Popular magazines and newspapers were filled with stories of homeless boys and the veterans-turned-migrants of the Bonus Army commandeering boxcars. Popular culture, such as William Wellman's 1933 film, Wild Boys of the Road, and, most famously, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 and turned into a hit movie a year later, captured the Depression's dislocated populations.

These years witnessed the first significant reversal in the flow of people between rural and urban areas. Thousands of city-dwellers fled the jobless cities and moved to the country looking for work. As relief efforts floundered, many state and local officials threw up barriers to migration, making it difficult for newcomers to receive relief or find work. Some state legislatures made it a crime to bring poor migrants into the state and allowed local officials to deport migrants to neighboring states. In the winter of 1935-1936, California, Florida, and Colorado established "border blockades" to block poor migrants from their states and reduce competition with local residents for jobs. A billboard outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, informed potential migrants that there were "NO JOBS in California" and warned them to "KEEP Out."

Sympathy for migrants, however, accelerated late in the Depression with the publication of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family's struggles drew attention to the plight of Depression-era migrants and, just a month after the nationwide release of the film version, Congress created the Select Committee to Investigate the Interstate Migration of Destitute Citizens. Starting in 1940, the Committee held widely publicized hearings. But it was too late. Within a year of its founding, defense industries were already gearing up in the wake of the outbreak of World War II, and the "problem" of migration suddenly became a lack of migrants needed to fill war industries. Such relief was nowhere to be found in the 1930s.

Americans meanwhile feared foreign workers willing to work for even lower wages. The Saturday Evening Post warned that foreign immigrants, who were "compelled to accept employment on any terms and conditions offered," would exacerbate the economic crisis. On September 8, 1930, the Hoover administration issued a press release on the administration of immigration laws "under existing conditions of unemployment." Hoover instructed consular officers to scrutinize carefully the visa applications of those "likely to become public charges" and suggested that this might include denying visas to most, if not all, alien laborers and artisans. The crisis itself had served to stifle foreign immigration, but such restrictive and exclusionary actions in the first years of the Depression intensified its effects. The number of European visas issued fell roughly 60 percent while deportations dramatically increased. Between 1930 and 1932, 54,000 people were deported. An additional 44,000 deportable aliens left "voluntarily."

Exclusionary measures hit Mexican immigrants particularly hard. The State Department made a concerted effort to reduce immigration from Mexico as early as 1929 and Hoover's executive actions arrived the following year. Officials in the Southwest led a coordinated effort to push out Mexican immigrants. In Los Angeles, the Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief began working closely with federal officials in early 1931 to conduct deportation raids while the Los Angeles County Department of Charities began a simultaneous drive to repatriate Mexicans and Mexican Americans on relief, negotiating a charity rate with the railroads to return Mexicans "voluntarily" to their mother country. According to the federal census, from 1930 to 1940 the Mexican-born population living in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas fell from 616,998 to 377,433. Franklin Roosevelt did not indulge anti-immigrant sentiment as willingly as Hoover had. Under the New Deal, the Immigration and Naturalization Service halted some of the Hoover Administration's most divisive practices, but, with jobs suddenly scarce, hostile attitudes intensified, and official policies less than welcoming, immigration plummeted and deportations rose. Over the course of the Depression, more people left the United States than entered it.

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On the Great Plains, environmental catastrophe deepened America's longstanding agricultural crisis and magnified the tragedy of the Depression. Beginning in 1932, severe droughts hit from Texas to the Dakotas and lasted until at least 1936. The droughts compounded years of agricultural mismanagement.