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“The older the girls, who helped break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new” (Cather 96).

Before attending work in the city, these immigrant girls would do the work of men in the fields at home.  They learned quickly that they had no other option than to work because otherwise times at home would be more difficult. The girls who would work on the farms before working in town seemed to be more aware and prepared for hard work in their future lives.

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“‘So it's the Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy’" (87).

One summer, Ántonia was working and drove a grain wagon. Out in the fields one evening, Ántonia and her coworkers were resting when a poor man stumbled across them. He was disheveled and  dressed in ragged clothes, his face unshaved and his toes sticking out of his shoes. He began talking, and he asked where to find beer. Ántonia instructed the man that the Bohemians had beer, and the Norwegians didn’t. The man then replied, “‘So it's the Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy’" (87). His statement is emblematic of the changing immigration patterns of the time, and the influx of diverse ethnicities amongst immigrants.

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"[The Shimerdas] hated Krajiek, but they clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk" (18).

When the Shimerdas arrived in America, Mr. Krajiek was the only person with whom they could communicate. Consequently, Mr. Krajiek used the Shimerdas' dependence on him to coerce them.

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"All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English" (98).

A common assumption about immigrants is that they can't speak English and are ignorant. This assumption is rooted in truth; many immigrants can't speak English. However, being unable to speak English is not an indicator of intelligence. English is not a superior language, yet American culture makes it out to be one.

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A typical anti-immigrant comment is for all immigrants to learn and only speak English because ‘this is America.’ However, the United States of America does not have an official language.

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fyi: english isn't the official language of the united states - cnn

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FYI: English isn't the official language of the United States

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A lot of multilingual countries promote an official language, but the United States has never done so with English. In fact, the US has no official language.

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Erika Lee explains in her Washington Post article how xenophobia has become tradition in America. She discusses presidential xenophobia, both in the present day and in the 18th century. She also explains the history of American xenophobia, starting in 1840s and ending in the present day.

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Students walk out of school in Los Angeles to defend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on Nov. 12. (Sarah Reingewirtz/AP)

The immigrants who are coming are "the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation." They herd together and "will soon so outnumber us that ... we will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. ... I wish ... the number of purely white people ... were increased."

While these sentiments may echo President Trump's remarks on immigration, these words do not come from our current commander in chief in 2019 but from Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s. The threatening foreigners Franklin feared so much were Germans coming to Pennsylvania. The numbers of "purely white people" he wanted increased were the English.

Trump may be the most xenophobic American leader in United States history. From the effort to restrict immigrants from mostly Muslim countries and the drastic reduction in refugee admissions, to efforts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and the denial of asylum seekers from Central America, Trump's policies have transformed immigration to the United States.

But the truth is that xenophobia has always been a central part of American life. It is an American tradition that shapes our worldview, mobilizes voters and generates profits. It influences our international relations and dictates domestic policy. And it is a form of racism and discrimination that has threatened the democratic ideals upon which this country was founded.

For Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, Catholic immigrants posed the danger. In 1841, Morse warned that Catholic foreigners were an "insidious invasion" of the country and an "enemy to [its] democracy." New technology like Morse's telegraph expedited the spread of these ideas, and anti-Catholic xenophobia spread across the country. Violence and bloodshed hit a peak in Louisville on Election Day in 1855 when 500 members of the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic American Party, also known as the "Know Nothing" party, tore through the city attacking foreigners. An estimated 22 to 100, mostly Irish and German Catholic immigrants, died in what has been remembered as "Bloody Monday."

Two decades later on the West Coast, 25,000 people gathered in San Francisco to condemn Chinese immigration and to hear politicians like California Gov. William Irwin blame the Chinese for all of the state's social and economic problems. The Chinese, he claimed in 1876, subverted "everything that goes into American civilization." Six years later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to single out a specific immigrant group for exclusion. Immigration from China plummeted. Nearly 40,000 Chinese immigrants had entered the country in 1882, but five years later, only 10 did. Initially passed as a temporary measure, the Exclusion Act remained in effect for 61 years.

By the 1890s, Italians, Jews and others from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe were labeled "inferior races" by the country's leading scientists and politicians. Both the Ku Klux Klan and eugenicist and best-selling author Madison Grant warned of the "flood of foreigners" who pushed the "native born" aside, and they called for an "America for Americans." Discriminatory national origins quotas put in place in the 1920s kept the doors open to immigrants from northern and western Europe but closed them to southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as those from Asia. Even refugees fleeing Nazi Europe could not find a way into the United States.

During the Great Depression, calls to "get rid of the Mexicans" became a part of local and federal policies. Nearly 20 percent of the entire Mexican and Mexican American population in the United States was pushed out of the country, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens by birth.

The next decade, Japanese Americans were the targets. Some 120,000 were forced from their homes and incarcerated in camps for the duration of World War II because the U.S. government said that they were a threat to national security. Two-thirds of them had been born in the United States. This effort even expanded beyond the U.S. border as the government also orchestrated and financed the mass roundup of innocent men, women and children of Japanese descent in Latin America, citing "hemispheric security." By the time the program ended in 1944, over 2,000 Japanese Latin Americans, including citizens and permanent residents of 12 Latin American countries, had been apprehended, deported and incarcerated in the United States.

A brief reprieve emerged during the 1960s when the civil rights movement helped secure popular support for immigration reform. The 1965 Immigration Act abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that had been in place since 1924 and explicitly prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence in the U.S. government's decisions to issue immigrant visas. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into law just steps from the Statue of Liberty.

Nevertheless, xenophobia persevered. While both liberal and conservative lawmakers professed a commitment to civil rights and racial equality, the law they passed was designed to privilege European immigration and deter immigration from Latin America, particularly from Mexico. Written into the law was the first numerical cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, for example, and other measures ended certain types of Mexican migration, required increased documentation or singled out Mexican immigrants for restriction and scrutiny. Undocumented immigration from Mexico increased as a result.

By the 1990s, xenophobia became a central part of the growing conservative movement. Writers, scholars and politicians like Peter Brimelow, Samuel Huntington and Patrick Buchanan warned that growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia were not assimilating and constituted an assault against white America, which they argued, represented the core of American identity. The "war on illegal immigration" begun in the 1990s proved to be an effective means of driving voters to the polls, electing conservative politicians and shifting the balance of power in the United States rightward on a number of political issues - not only immigration, but also gun control, abortion rights, welfare reform and the environment.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Islamophobia, initially promoted by a fringe network of individuals allied with extreme conservative and religious-right organizations, became a key message of the Republican Party and in the mainstream media discourse.

By the time that Republican Donald Trump ran for president in 2015, calling for a "great big wall" along the southern border and a "complete and total shutdown" of Muslims coming to the United States, the idea that Mexican "criminals" and Muslim "terrorists" were "invading" the United States had been well established and even normalized in the media. Many Americans expressed outrage at these explicitly racist and xenophobic positions. But in fact, Trump was repeating a message that had been gaining traction for decades, and has long been an American tradition.

And yet, there is another American tradition that has persisted: challenging xenophobia. Throughout U.S. history, immigrants and their allies have defied the most pernicious expressions and acts of xenophobia and appealed for moderation and justice. When Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (Mass.) introduced a literacy bill in 1896 that would have barred illiterate immigrants, for example, he faced resistance from his colleague John Fitzgerald, congressman for the 11th District in Boston. Lodge reportedly confronted him at the Capitol and asked, "Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?" "As much as your father or mine," Fitzgerald replied. "It was only a difference of a few ships."

During first half of the 20th century, writers and playwrights such as Israel Zangwill, Mary Antin and Carlos Bulosan used their works to humanize immigrants and appeal to Americans' commitment to equality. More recently, immigrant rights activists, along with unions, civil rights organizations and faith leaders, have maintained a vociferous opposition to mass deportation and punitive immigration laws.

In these ways, Americans have embraced and embodied the core American ideals and values that xenophobia has threatened. May their examples serve as inspiration to us all who seek to challenge xenophobia in our own time.

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Perspective | Trump's xenophobia is an American tradition - but it doesn't have to be

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The immigrants who are coming are "the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation." They herd together and "will soon so outnumber us that ... we will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. ... I wish ...

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According to Erika Lee, Xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments are born from fear. Americans fear outsiders, and always have. And yet, nearly all Americans are descendent from outsiders; Americans fear what—and who—is different.

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This is the second of five pieces in an occasional series, derived from recent interviews with scholars at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts.

University of Minnesota historian Erika Lee's just-published book is titled "America for Americans." It is a history of our "nation of immigrants," as the United States is sometimes called, and also a nation with a recurring history of xenophobia.

Xenophobia is a fear of the "other," the outsider, including the foreigner who seeks to come to one's country. In fact, "America for Americans" is subtitled "A History of Xenophobia in the United States."

(This is another in an occasional series of interviews with U of M scholars, originally written for the magazine of the U of M's College of Liberal Arts. The overall theme of the interviews was "Work in Progress," suggesting that America always has work to do to live up to its aspirations.)

Romantic self-image meets anti-immigrant emotion

Except for the members of the native tribal nations, everyone in America is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants. The romantic self-image of our country sometimes draws on that "nation of immigrants" image, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, standing in the harbor importuning the world to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

As Donald Trump rose to the presidency, tapping into, among other things, a wave of anti-immigrant emotion in the electorate, Lee was finishing her history of xenophobia. Naturally, when I interviewed Lee, we talked about the tension between the message on the statue and the anti-immigrant message that Trump rode to the Oval Office. Of course, she told me, xenophobia and anti-immigrant backlashes are nothing new to our history.

"You cannot understand Trump's America, or the history of how we got here, without specifically understanding the role of immigration in our history, and the history of its use as a political issue," she said.

As a college undergrad herself, at Tufts University, Lee first took an interest in the topic when she studied the xenophobic reaction to the early waves of Chinese immigrants to America. That included the so-called "Chinese Exclusion Act," adopted in 1882. The 1882 law was the first in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration. It declared a 10-year moratorium on new arrivals, specifically from China. The law was updated through the decades, and the total ban on new arrivals from China expired, but the last successor to that law was not repealed until 1942.

One of the versions of those laws applied to Lee's own grandparents, although it obviously didn't prevent them from coming to America. Lee said her grandparents hadn't told her much, during her childhood, about how they came to America, or of the anti-Chinese sentiments they faced.

During her own life, anti-immigrant sentiment seemed milder than what her grandparents had had to overcome, although as a historian she knew that it was a recurring theme. She recalls thinking: "Thank goodness, it [anti-immigration sentiment] isn't that bad anymore."

Students often surprised by history of barriers

As she proceeded to grad school (M.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley), immigration history became a focus. As she entered her teaching career, students often seemed surprised at the history of barriers to immigration, having grown up in a less xenophobic era. Up to 2016, Lee said, the country "seemed to have been lulled into a mood of complacency," believing America had become a more welcoming place to newcomers.

Then came Trump, whose immigrant-bashing demagoguery seemed to contribute to his political success. Trump described new arrivals as "people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

This was aimed less at Asian immigrants and more at Latin Americans emigrating across the Mexican border, and at Muslims, against whom Trump pledged as a candidate (and later, unsuccessfully, attempted) to impose "a total and complete shutdown."

The United States has long granted citizenship to anyone born here. Trump has mocked that practice as ridiculous. He wants it repealed, but says that if Congress doesn't act, he might try to do it by executive order. He has issued some orders designed to cut down on automatic citizenship, but has not ordered an overall ban on birthright citizenship.

Lee described her reaction to Trump's rhetoric, and then to his unexpected election, as "stunned." She recalled going to class the day after the election. She faced many students who were themselves refugees or children of recent immigrants. Bravely and honestly, many of them shared with their classmates what this sudden change in the climate toward foreign arrivals felt like to them, and "how desperately they feared" for their own families. They feared being deported themselves or worried about relatives, some of whom were languishing in refugee camps and were understandably worried that their chances of being accepted for admission into the United States was disappearing in the increasingly hostile political climate.

A need to reassess immigration history

As a historian, Lee knew that these impulses were not brand new to America. But as the issue moved to the front pages, she felt that "we really needed to reassess our immigration history, to really understand why in 2016, our country, built by immigrants, celebrated as a nation of immigrants, would have elected someone running on these politics and now supporting these increasingly draconian policies the likes of which we had not seen in our lifetimes."

"We needed to have an honest, brave conversations, about the democratic values on which the country was founded," she said. "And we did have those conversations. We've been trying to encourage a broader and deeper understanding of xenophobia. It's something beyond a prejudice that some people have. It's almost an ideology, a worldview, a form of systemic discrimination against not only those who were actually born in a foreign country, but those who are perceived to be foreign because, for example, of the way they look.

"That's important. Our country still has certain understandings of who is an American. I'm a third-generation American. But some may not see me as an American, because they see me as Asian."

So to prepare for writing "America for Americans," Lee traced the enduring history of American xenophobia. The definition of that term is not as simple as resistance to allowing more migration into America, she said. The meaning of the original Greek term means "fear of the stranger."

'A fear of foreigners, but it's more than that'

Lee said: "Xenophobia is a form of fear, a fear of foreigners, but it's more than that. It's a form of racism." Racism and fear have combined at times, as in the ugly chapter during World War II, when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in barbed wire camps for no crime other than being of Japanese descent.

Lee said: "I promote the understanding that xenophobia is an ideology and a worldview that's based on the premise that certain foreigners, and even the American-born descendants of immigrants, are threats to our nation and its people.

"I emphasize that it's an irrational fear, often manufactured and exploited by those who are seeking to maintain or change the balance of power in the United States."

"And it's not just about issues of immigration. The reason it's so important to America is that it's about who has the power to define who gets to be an American, who gets to enjoy the privileges of being an American citizen and who does not."

Every nation is entitled to secure and police its borders to adopt regulations governing legal immigration and the path to citizenship, and to deal with these matters in what it believes are the national interest, Lee said. The U.S. government is certainly justified in making a judgment, based on the national interest, about how many immigrants and refugees to accept.

"But those positions and laws and regulations do not have to be xenophobic," she said. "They don't have to be drawn from a place of fear, or a violent and racist worldview of hatred for certain groups."

Lee argues that President Trump's exploitation of these issues, for political gain, have been racist and have stoked a rise in racism among his supporters, encouraging people to follow their worst instincts.

Coming to the U.S. border to seek asylum is a legal process, Lee said, and the laws governing that process should be followed.

But Trump is deliberately casting doubt on the credibility and viability of those laws and processes. His goal, she believes, is "to make it harder for asylum seekers to get into that process" by first narrowing the ports of entry so they were stopped up and backed up, which created what she called a "made-for-media impression that the border is out of control" and that the homeland was threatened with being overrun by dangerous migrants.

'A very savvy political strategy'

"It's a very savvy political strategy," she said. And it has worked for him, convincing his base that "the country is being overrun by dangerous criminals, and that only Trump's proposed wall can fix it."

But this issue certainly didn't come out of nowhere. Her book provides some of the context that, Lee said, comes from and builds on a tradition that goes way back to many episodes across U.S. history when nativist groups and politicians have raised alarms that newcomers to America were a threat.

The issue comes and goes in waves, Lee said, but Trump built on a wave that has been rising since the late 1970s when an organization called the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) came into being to advocate for reducing immigration. At first, Lee said, FAIR seemed too extreme to be taken seriously by mainstream public opinion. But FAIR turned out to be "very adept at pushing public opinion toward the view that immigration - both legal and illegal - was dangerous to America."

An author and Forbes Magazine editor named Peter Brimelow wrote a 1995 bestseller titled " Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster." Harvard University history professor Samuel Huntington made a bigger splash with "The Clash of Civilizations" (1996), which predicted that future wars would not be between countries, but between cultures.

Also in the 1990s, Pat Buchanan made two angry outsider bids for the Republican presidential nomination on a platform that included the argument that America was under threat from a rising tide of Latin American and Muslim immigrants.

Lee said that Buchanan in 1992 "proposed a very specific border platform and talked about illegal aliens as an 'invasion force,' and about the need to control borders, but there was little interest. ... But during the '90s, both parties took on the issue of border security. ... Under [Democratic President Bill] Clinton, we get the militarization of the US.-Mexican border, with increased border patrols." In 2006, Republican President George W. Bush signed the "Secure Fence Act," which authorized 700 miles of new fencing on the Mexican border.

The point, she said, is that long before Trump, presidents have been aware that a reservoir of fear existed in the electorate about lax border enforcement and that, well before Trump, "our reaction to immigration over the past decades has been from a position of fear."

"It has focused on particular populations, like Mexican immigrants, while ignoring other factors that also explain immigration, including our continued need for migrant workers and our existing immigration laws, which provided hardly any way for unskilled or low-skilled workers to come into the United States legally," Lee said.

"Going back to '70s and up to today, and considering our economy's continued dependence on unskilled workers, undocumented immigration has become a permanent feature," she said. And yet politicians have continued "demonizing the people" who do these jobs that legal residents don't want. Among the businesses that rely on this, she noted, is Trump's own Mar-a-Lago Golf Club in Florida.

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Erika Lee on the enduring history of American xenophobia, drawn 'from a place of fear' | MinnPost

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This is the second of five pieces in an occasional series, derived from recent interviews with scholars at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. University of Minnesota historian Erika Lee's just-published book is titled "America for Americans."

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"'I never made anything to him with my eyes. I can't help it if he hangs around, and I can't order him off. It ain't my prairie'" (83).

As a young teenager, Lena Lingard worked out on the prairies, driving cattle. As she did so, an older, married man named Mr. Benson took a penchant to her. He hung around Lena while she worked, much to the chagrin of his wife, Mary. Lena was uninterested in Mr. Benson, but was unable to avoid him. Nevertheless, the town placed Mr. Benson's infidelity entirely upon Lena's shoulders.

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"Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell them anything he chose" (13).

The Shimerdas had no choice but to believe whatever Mr. Krajiek told them. He was their sole interpreter, and he became the only outside voice that mattered.

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"It seemed to me how wonderful that she [Lena] should have got on so well in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it" (128).

When Lena grew up, she left Black Hawk and moved to the big city. There she made a name for herself and started up a tailoring shop. She is a success story of the American dream, and exemplifies what immigrants—like the Shimerdas—hoped to achieve.

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Most states provide worker’s compensation to undocumented immigrants. However, some states take advantage of undocumented immigrants by criminalizing filing for worker’s compensation under false identification. This criminalization takes advantage of the injured, similarly to how Mr. Krajiek took advantage of the Shimerdas.

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An analysis of workers' compensation cases in Florida revealed that insurers were exploiting the fact that the employees they insured were undocumented, in order to get out of paying their medical bills and lost wages.

In the U.S., states often provide undocumented workers the right to receive workers' compensation. But in Florida, the state enacted a law that makes it a crime to file a workers' compensation claim using a false identification. Insurers are allegedly abusing this law.

According to ProPublica and NPR, which analyzed 14 years of state insurance fraud data, there were almost 800 cases in the state where undocumented employees were arrested under the law - 130 of those employees were injured.

"An additional 125 workers were arrested after a workplace injury prompted the state to check the personnel records of other employees," ProPublica and NPR reported.

Simon Blank, the director of the Florida insurance fraud unit, told NPR and ProPublica that it was not his organization's responsibility to find the intent of the insurance companies that filed a complaint. He said it would be "unfortunate" if insurers were indeed using the law to get out of paying workers' compensation for undocumented immigrants.

Florida is not the only state that has tried to curtail undocumented immigrants' rights to workers' compensation. In Ohio, a chicken processor, Case Farms, has garnered attention for quelling its employees' labor disputes by using their immigration status to eliminate dissent and avoid paying for injuries, ProPublica reported.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio wrote a letter to the CEO of Case Farms saying that the allegation "raises serious questions about the company's commitment to workers' safety and workers' rights."

"Each infraction on its own is concerning," Brown wrote, "but taken together they underscore a corporate culture at Case Farms that appears to emphasize profit maximization at all costs, including workers' livelihoods and limbs."

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Here's another way businesses are taking advantage of undocumented immigrants

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An analysis of workers' compensation cases in Florida revealed that insurers were exploiting the fact that the employees they insured were undocumented, in order to get out of paying their medical bills and lost wages. In the U.S., states often provide undocumented workers the right to receive workers' compensation.

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Illiteracy among immigrants is a weakness that many exploit. Not only as Mr. Krajiek did to the Shimerdas in the late 1800s, people continue to exploit immigrants today, wielding the immigrants' illiteracy as a weapon.

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A Honduran asylum seeker carries her son while they wait in line for water bottles in an encampment near the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, on Sept. 12. (Veronica Cardenas/Reuters)

In keeping with the Trump administration's determination to disincentivize migrants from coming to the United States, U.S. Customs and Border Protection often conveniently exploits asylum seekers who cannot read. Along with an unfamiliarity with our deliberately complex immigration system, the illiteracy of Central American migrants, especially women, facilitates the deportation of parents and separation of families.

By manipulating illiterate refugees who often unwittingly sign away their rights, the U.S. government is violating the basic tenets of the internationally recognized and protected right to seek asylum.

As part of one of my courses at Barnard College, several classmates and I spent a week at the South Texas Family Residential Center volunteering with the Dilley Pro Bono Project, where we assisted detained migrant women and children from Central America. We answered questions, prepared them for interviews to determine whether they had credible fears of returning to their home countries and helped them fill out paperwork.

What I did not anticipate becoming one of the most challenging aspects of my week on the border was how migrant women's illiteracy and lack of formal education presented a constant and often invisible barrier to their ability to seek asylum.

The documents provided by the Department of Homeland Security require extensive personal information from asylum seekers, including the names and birthdays of themselves and their children, contact information for the sponsors who would receive them after they're released from detention, and details about when and where they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and how long they had been in detention. But official DHS forms ask for all of this information in English. This presents an enormous and obvious barrier for non-English-speaking migrants.

Simple translation is not enough. The Dilley Pro Bono Project provides documents in Spanish, but even this paperwork was difficult for many migrant women to understand. Many women I helped to fill out paperwork struggled simply to write their children's birth dates.

The majority of women and children seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border are from the "Northern Triangle," the region encompassing Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where 54 percent of all current pending immigration cases originate. Literacy rates for Central American women are significantly lower than in other Latin American countries. Guatemalan women, many of whom are indigenous and not native Spanish speakers, are the least likely to be able to read and write, with a literacy rate of 76 percent compared with 87 percent for men.

The intentionally dense and obtuse language of DHS forms raises grave concerns about the extent to which migrant women understand any of the legal paperwork that government officials pressure them to sign. During the family separation crisis last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that border officials misled and pressured parents to sign their own deportation papers to be reunited with their children. The report found that distraught parents had only a few minutes to review the forms and weren't provided any information about the safety and whereabouts of their children.

Although most women I worked with struggled to understand the paperwork, many preserved small pieces of paper throughout their harrowing journey with hopes that U.S. officials could use them affirm to their cases. One mother stitched court documents and police reports into her child's blanket because she believed they were critical evidence to support her asylum claim. The resourcefulness and determination of these migrant women cannot be understated; those who understood the forms often helped out those who were lost.

Regardless, a more compassionate immigration system wouldn't subject migrants to this test. For many immigrants, being deported is a matter of life or death, as returning to their home countries often means they are in danger of being killed. Why should such a fate depend upon whether a migrant can read a government document?

The Post's View: A Trump policy has subjected asylum seekers to appalling conditions

Harry Litman: Trump just bought himself months of court frustration with his latest immigration rule

The Post's View: A report documents the systematic abuse inflicted on migrant children

Ericka Andersen: Migrants who want better for their children aren't bad parents. They're the best.

The Post's View: Trump's latest assault on migrant children definitely won't fly

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Opinion | U.S. immigration officials are manipulating illiterate migrants. This must stop.

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In keeping with the Trump administration's determination to disincentivize migrants from coming to the United States, U.S. Customs and Border Protection often conveniently exploits asylum seekers who cannot read. Along with an unfamiliarity with our deliberately complex immigration system, the illiteracy of Central American migrants, especially women, facilitates the deportation of parents and separation of families.

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“Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters, and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was a food daughter to her mother” (81).

Most of Lena’s late childhood and adolescence revolved around caring for her younger siblings and parents. She had to live selflessly, and amidst town gossip and criticism, Lena’s devotion to her family was irrefutable.

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“Once he [a passenger on the train] sat down to chat, he told us [Jimmy and Jake] that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.  ‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl’” (Cather 6).

When Jimmy, the narrator, began talking to a passenger on the train, he began realizing people, such as the Shimerdas, come to America and travel far in order to try to make money. Although, no one knew English, the Shimerdas knew that someone would eventually learn in their family and there was better job opportunities in America than their home country.

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Gabby Resnick compares the modern education system in America to the American Dream. She questions whether or not the American Dream is worthwhile, and if devoting a life to working overtime for the chance at success later on is worth it.

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I am always doing something. During bonus I am meeting with a teacher. During lunch I am in a club. Before school I am preparing for a test. After school I am meeting with a college counselor, and when I have free time, I am doing homework. Like I said before, I am always doing something.

A few nights ago, sitting at my desk with more to do than I could wrap my head around, I wondered why I put myself through so much stress. Why can I not just sit at bonus, do absolutely nothing, and just relax?

Well, after days of reflective thought, I think I figured it out. 5 out of 7 days in the week I am at school for a minimum of 7 hours. That is at least 35 hours a week. 35 hours when I could be going to the gym, swimming in the ocean at the beach, hiking to the Hollywood sign, spending time with my family, or even organizing my perpetually messy room. So, if so much of my life is going to be dedicated to going to school, I feel like I need to make it worth it.

This mentality, right or wrong, is why I am always doing something. It also is why I get stressed easily and am often overwhelmed. However, I have noticed that I am not alone in this. In fact, this mentality is prevalent among Americans.

America cultivates a culture of ambition. People originally came to America, and still come to America, to live the American dream. They search for the promised opportunity. However, in present day, what really is the American dream? Americans hold ambition to work hard. Ambition to make money to provide for oneself and one's family.

Money. Is the American dream to make money? In America, if you don't have a job and don't have health insurance, you will live in fear of the future. You will be risking the future of the life you live. That being said, if you are working a job that you despise so that you can have a "good life," are you truly living a good life?

We Americans break our necks to be doing something worthwhile. We may do this because we want to feel like we are being productive, and we may be doing this in order to create a good life, in which money is not a concern, for our kids. That being said, if a parent is working hard at all times and is never home, are their kids really benefiting?

The same thing goes for me, and other students like me. If I am always doing but never sitting with my friends at lunch because I am busy, am I really benefiting by missing out on bonding time that I will never get back?

My friends and I are all parting soon. I will never get those lunches back. Just like a parent will never get back those nights, reading bedtime stories to their kids,and listening to them laugh.

This all being said, in all honesty, I can tell you that I will not stop meeting with teachers at bonus, or going to clubs at lunch. I will not stop occupying my school day with things I need to do. I will continue to fill my day with things that make me feel productive. However, what I can tell you is that I will stop searching out things to occupy myself with. I will eat lunch with my friends when I can, because that is being productive.

At school, our brains are on go at all times. As students we are expected to pay attention in every class, take notes without being distracted, and retain all the information we learned. Then, when we go home, we are expected to do more homework in order to really soak in all the material we spent 7 hours learning during the day. Our brains need a break. Sitting and eating lunch with our friends is that break. It allows us to breathe, setting ourselves up to be more productive throughout the rest of the day.

But then, this makes me think, we shouldn't have to have a practical reason for socializing. Life isn't all about the end game. In our pursuit of success, or just to meet the demands of the day, we forget about the quality of life. We have all been blessed with this gift of life, and we often forget the impact of this gift.

We get so caught up in the good and the bad that this gift brings that we neglect to look at the gift in its entirety. Yes, life comes with stresses and lots of work. However, life is life. It is our job to make it what we want in order to successfully live the American dream.

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The American Dream: Healthy Ambition or Unhealthy Obsession?

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I am always doing something. During bonus I am meeting with a teacher. During lunch I am in a club. Before school I am preparing for a test. After school I am meeting with a college counselor, and when I have free time, I am doing homework.

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“‘‘America big country; much money, much land for my [Ántonia’s papa] boys, much husband for my girls” ... ‘[Ántonia’s papa] not want to come, nev-er!...But my mama, she want Ambrosch for to be rich, with many cattle”’ (Cather 45).

Before the death of Ántonia’s father, he told the family that it was necessary for his family to move. Like other immigrants he thought that coming to the United States and farming like other Americans would make them rich.  However, that was rarely the case, and the Shimerdas never did become rich.

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Throughout the video, it explains the melting pot in America in through a song. The audience of this video is intended to be children. The creators of this video wanted to show children that America is made up of immigrants.

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Schoolhouse Rock - ''The Great American Melting Pot''

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Throughout time, the melting pot has been a part of society.  Without having different mixes of cultures, America wouldn’t be the same.  America has been made of immigrants since the Colonial Age and continues to be a refuge and new way for many immigrants both past and present.

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The current Supreme Court term has been dominated by the Constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the health-care legislation better known as Obamacare. But the Court has recently heard another case, this one concerning the controversial Arizona immigration law passed in 2010. Though five other states have passed similar laws, Arizona's is the toughest one to date that attempts to get control of illegal immigration and its social and economic costs. The problems surrounding illegal immigration that this bill attempts to solve involve not just practical policies, but the very meaning of American identity and history.

For Americans, these issues have particular resonance; as we continually hear, we are a "nation of immigrants." Many see the laws targeting immigrants as a repudiation of this heritage, an ethnocentric or even racist attempt to impose and monitor an exclusive notion of American identity and culture. Additionally, opponents claim that these laws invite the police to practice discriminatory "racial profiling," creating the possibility that legal immigrants and U.S. citizens are unjustly detained and questioned.

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

As President Obama said in April 2010, laws like Arizona's "threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans." The greater significance of this case, however, is the way it touches on deeply held and frequently conflicting beliefs about the role of immigration in American history and national identity. These beliefs have generated two popular metaphors: the melting pot and the salad bowl.

The melting pot metaphor arose in the eighteenth century, sometimes appearing as the "smelting pot" or "crucible," and it described the fusion of various religious sects, nationalities, and ethnic groups into one distinct people: Ex pluribus unum. In 1782, French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote that in America, "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."

A century later, Ralph Waldo Emerson used the "melting pot" image to describe "the fusing process" that "transforms the English, the German, the Irish emigrant into an American . . . The individuality of the immigrant, almost even his traits of race and religion, fuse down in the democratic alembic like chips of brass thrown into the melting pot." The phrase gained wider currency in 1908, during the great wave of Slavic, Jewish, and Italian immigration, when Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot was produced. In it, a character enthuses, "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!"

The idea of the melting pot, then, communicated the historically exceptional notion of American identity as one formed not by the accidents of blood, sect, or race, but by the unifying beliefs and political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity. Of course, this ideal was violated in American history over the centuries by racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and other ignorant prejudices. But over time, changes in law and social mores have taken place, making the United States today the most inclusive and tolerant nation in the world, the destination of choice for those millions desiring more freedom and opportunity.

In the melting pot metaphor, inalienable human rights transcend group identity.

Of course, this process of assimilation also entailed costs and painful sacrifices. Having voted with his feet for the superiority of America, the immigrant was required to become American, to learn the language, history, political principles, and civic customs that identified an American as American. This demand was necessarily in conflict with the immigrants' old culture and its values, and, at times, it led to the painful loss of the old ways and customs. But how immigrants negotiated the conflicts and trade-offs between their new and old identities was up to them, and they were free in civil society to celebrate and retain those cultures through fraternal organizations, ethnic festivals, language schools, and religious guilds.

Still, they had to make their first loyalty to America and its ideals. If some custom, value, or belief of the old country conflicted with those core American values, then that old way had to be modified or discarded if the immigrant wanted to participate fully in American social, economic, and political life. The immigrant was the one who had to adjust; no one expected the majority culture to modify its values to accommodate the immigrant. After all, there were too many immigrants to do this without fragmenting American culture. No matter the costs, assimilation was the only way to forge an unum from so many pluribus.

Starting in the Sixties, however, another vision of American pluralism arose, captured in the metaphor of the salad bowl. Rather than assimilating, now different ethnic groups would coexist in their separate identities like the ingredients in a salad, bound together only by the "dressing" of law and the market. This view expresses the ideology of multiculturalism, which goes far beyond the demand that ethnic differences be acknowledged rather than disparaged.

Long before multiculturalism ever existed, Americans wrestled with the conflicts and clashes immigrants experienced in their lives. A book from the Forties on "intercultural education" announced its intent "to help our schools to deal constructively with the problem of intercultural and interracial tensions among our people" and to alleviate "the hurtful discrimination against some of the minority groups which compose our people." One recommendation was to create school curricula that would "help build respect for groups not otherwise sufficiently esteemed." Modern multiculturalism takes that idea but goes much farther by endorsing a species of identity politics predicated on victimization.

In the Sixties, another vision of American pluralism arose: the salad bowl.

And that, in fact, is what multiculturalism is really about-not respecting or celebrating the "salad bowl" of cultural or ethnic diversity, but indicting American civilization for its imperial, colonial, xenophobic, and racist sins. Multiculturalism idealizes immigrant cultures and ignores their various dysfunctional practices and values. But at the same time, it relentlessly attacks America as a predatory, soulless, exploitative, war-mongering villain responsible for all the world's ills.

Worse still, the identity politics at the heart of multiculturalism directly contradicts the core assumption of our liberal democracy: the principle of individual and inalienable rights that each of us possess no matter what group or sect we belong to. Multiculturalism confines the individual in the box of his race or culture-the latter often simplistically defined in terms of clichés and stereotypes-and then demands rights and considerations for that group, a special treatment usually based on the assumption that the group has been victimized in the past and so deserves some form of reparations. The immigrant "other" (excluding, of course, immigrants from Europe) is now a privileged victim entitled to public acknowledgement of his victim status and obeisance to the superiority of his native culture, equally a victim of American historical malfeasance.

The common identity shaped by the Constitution, the English language, and the history, mores, and heroes of America has been replaced by multifarious, increasingly fragmented micro-identities. But without this loyalty to the common core values and ideals upon which national identity is founded, without a commitment to the non-negotiable foundational beliefs that transcend special interests, without the sense of a shared destiny and goals, a nation starts to weaken as its people see no goods beyond their own groups' interests and successes.

The problems of illegal immigration are worsened by multicultural identity politics. Many immigrants, legal or otherwise, are now encouraged to celebrate and prefer the cultures they have fled to the one that has given them greater freedom and opportunity. Our schools and popular culture reinforce this separatism, encouraging Americans to relate to others outside our own identity group not as fellow citizens, but either as rivals for power or influence, or as oppressors from whom one is owed reparations in the form of government transfers or preferential policies. The essence of being an American has been reduced to a flabby "tolerance" that in fact masks a profound intolerance and anti-Americanism, for the groups multiculturalism celebrates are all defined in terms of their victimization by a sinful America.

No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the Arizona law, this problem of assimilation will remain. There will still be 11 million illegal immigrants whose fate must be decided. Millions of them no doubt are striving to become Americans despite the obstacles multiculturalism has put in their path. Many others have not developed that sense of American identity, nor have they been compelled, as immigrants were in the past, to acknowledge the goodness and superiority of America and give her their loyalty. Their relation to this country is merely economic or parasitic. Developing some way of determining which immigrants are which, and figuring out what to do with those who prefer not to be Americans, will be a difficult challenge in the years after the current case is adjudicated.

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The current Supreme Court term has been dominated by the Constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the health-care legislation better known as Obamacare. But the Court has recently heard another case, this one concerning the controversial Arizona immigration law passed in 2010.

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“There were never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even the mother was always offering me [Jimmy] things, though I knew she expected substantial presents in return” (Cather 23).

Although the Shimerdas had little to nothing due to just moving, they felt obligated to give when other people gave.  At times the Shimerdas seem to be constantly needing help to survive, but Jimmy’s family understands the fact they are just starting out on farming.

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“Much as I liked Ántonia, I [Jimmy] hated a superior tone that she sometimes took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her protecting manner” (Cather 24).

Ántonia’s personality is a combination of being vivacious and generous.  From time to time, however, Ántonia has the need to show she is older and has the authority over Jimmy in order to show him her controlling side.

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“‘He’s [Ántonia’s Brother Ambrosch] a worker, all right, mam, and he’s got some ketch-on about him; but he’s a mean one. Folks can be mean enough to get on in this world; and then ag’in they can be too mean’” (Cather 40).

This quote clearly defines Ambrosch.  Throughout the story, he was the controlling older brother who had to get the job even if it wasn’t in the nicest way.  He lied to neighbors, and when talking to neighbors, wasn’t the friendliest guy.  However, this figure watching over Ántonia shapes her to be who she is at the end of the novel.  Ambrosch’s presence in Ántonia’s younger years helped her experience the difficulties hard work brings.

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During the time period 1880-1920, the time in which the Shimerdas immigrated to the US, millions of others were joining them in the journey. Approximately 20 million people immigrated to the United States, and they all faced the same problem as the Shimerdas, surviving with what little they had.

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Contents

1. Immigration in the Colonial Era

2. Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

3. Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

4. European Immigration: 1880-1920

5. The Bracero Program

6. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

7. PHOTO GALLERIES

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country's first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country's immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Did you know? On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City's Lower East Side.

Some of America's first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America's immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America's native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics-especially the Irish-experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census-a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe-and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Bracero Program

The Bracero Program was a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States signed in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed - making it the largest U.S. contract labor program to date.

The program also addressed Depression-era deportations and brought many Mexican Americans, who were largely targeted for deportation at the time, back to the states.

The program was criticized because workers often faced discrimination, harsh working conditions, and had virtually no job security. Once their contracts expired, some Braceros returned home with little money because of debts incurred to the stores located in employer-operated housing camps, while others stayed in the United States illegally and sought additional work.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America's foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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Immigration in the Colonial Era Immigration in the Mid-19th Century Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation European Immigration: 1880-1920 The Bracero Program The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 PHOTO GALLERIES The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920.

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“Well-set-up country girls had come to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school” (Cather 96).

As the girls would get hired out to different jobs in town, such as sewing or taking care of children, they realized it was necessary for them to work just as hard as they had worked on the farm because their family back at the farm needed all the money they could to live through the year.

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In her TED talk, Colleen Bies tells the story of her family, and explains how her parents' hardships have taught her ambition and drive. By observing what her parents went through to provide their family, Bies learned to always work hard and to strive for success. Lena behaves similarly to Bies; both women are highly ambitious, and their ambition can be credited to their family's hardship and immigration journeys.

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Why Children of Immigrants Work so Hard | Colleen Bies | TEDxOshkosh

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Hired girls not only worked for families in the cities, but they also had jobs on farms, as servants, etc.  Hired girls had significant impacts on both their family and whomever they worked for because they provided for their family and the household/business man they worked for.  Not many girls were available for work, so whenever one became available, she would be hired soon after.

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DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

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Abstract

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given scant consideration to hired girls in rural and small-town America. Little is known about these women: who they were and why they hired out.

Novels and memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest answers to these questions. If they do not reveal precisely who these women were, they do at least tell us who people at the time thought they were. The purpose of this article is to examine, from a historical perspective, the image of the hired girl held by novelists and writers of memoirs, and to compare this image with what presentday historians have written about servants. Annette Atkins, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Sandra Myres, and Glenda Riley, among others, have exposed the dangers of treating novels about frontier women as historical fact.

who then, in the eyes of contemporary writers, were the hired girls? Were they young or old, single or married? Had they been born in America or overseas? Were they black or white? How well educated were they? Why did they hire out? Did people perceive hired girls as fundamentally different from other females?
DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF HIRED GIRLS
Age is one of the most important demographic characteristics to consider. Those females identified specifically as "hired girls" in both novels and memoirs about the agrarian plains were invariably young, in their mid teens to early twenties. Girls who hired out in their midteens include Faye Lewis, who later wrote about her South Dakota childhood in Nothing to Make a Shadow, and suffragist Jessie Haver Butler. Susette, in Mari Sandoz's biography of her father, Old Jules, was in service at nineteen.

The most detailed treatment of hired girls in the works under consideration is found in Willa Cather's My Àntonia. In this classic, Cather lovingly fictionalized the lives of those immigrant pioneers who settled the plains. One of these, the novelist's heroine, was the Bohemian Antonia Shimerda. Antonia worked as a field hand for three years before becoming a hired girl at seventeen. During her five years as a domestic, a number of her farm friends also moved to town seeking employment. Although Cather did not specify the ages of these secondary characters, it is clear from both the narrative and the context that they were also in their mid- to late teens. Cather suggested this in describing the girls physically and socially. First, the language used to portray them conveys the image of nascent sexuality. Lena Lingard, for example, caused a stir when she appeared in church dressed as a young lady. Until then, apparently no one had noticed the "swelling lines of her figure . . . hidden under the shapeless rags she wore in the field." Similarly, Cather's narrator Jim Burden described the three Bohemian Marys as "a menace to the social order" for the same reason. Secondly, the hired girls clearly shared interests transcending their status as immigrants and working women. Cather, who used "hired girl" to refer to all wage-earning women except teachers, described the preoccupation of the hired girls with their social lives, clothes, and dancing in terms that approximate historian Leslie Tentler's depiction of the female urban workplace as an "adolescent counterculture" in which social relations assumed paramount importance.

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The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I

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On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome.

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                                      #NewYorkCity

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                                      #NewYorkCity

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“Of all the nation’s metropolitan areas, New York City became its truest ‘melting pot’—a place where many different nationalities and ethnicities blended together” (Hillstrom 62).

New York City was significantly impacted by immigrants because of Ellis island. Immigrants had little to no money left, so they stayed where ever they first landed in America. This led to the biggest “melting pot” in the US because of the fact immigrants from all over came into Ellis Island.  This led to the blending of ethnicities and nationalities from all over the world.

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot

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“As Oscar Handlin wrote, ‘Many a new arrival who thought simply to pause in the place where he had landed was entrapped and never escaped. Some had exhausted all their funds in coming and were already paupers when they came off the ship; these were unlikely ever to earn enough to take them away’” (Hillstrom 63).

Immigrants used up all resources they had. As soon as they came to America, they expected a well paying job, but that wasn’t the case.  Many people had no money and barely living off of the money they were getting from their job. Dreams typically never came true.

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“They [Immigrants] did not feel shy, burdened, or uncomfortable sharing this information because everyone was for the most part in the same situation, or empathized because they knew that they could be them at any moment” (Sepúlveda 150).

Sepúlveda was giving a presentation to parents of elementary schoolers, and many of them had questions about their cases. Some openly admitted to crimes, unashamed and unconcerned. Just as in My Ántonia, the immigrant community is tight-knit and emphathetic toward one another; if they do not have one another, then they have no one.

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                               #laborinAmerica        

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”              Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                               #laborinAmerica        

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“Wherever immigrants decided to settle in America, their first priority was to find jobs. In many cases, ethnic groups were drawn to regions where the dominant industries could make use of skills and knowledge that the immigrants already possessed. In other words, immigrants who had worked as farmers, miners, textile-makers in Europe gravitated to regions of the United States where farming, mining, and textile jobs could be found” (Hillstrom 73).

Jobs were and still are significant in life.  Without a job, it is practically impossible to survive.  As people came to America in 1870-1920, they had to find jobs as soon as possible due to the fact they had used all of their resources trying to get there.  When they were looking for jobs, they went to jobs they knew they were skilled at.

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“No Human is Illegal” #sacrificeanddesperation

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“No Human is Illegal” #sacrificeanddesperation

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“People . . . had waited years to ensure their kids got an American education, were accepted into an American university, and could live out the dream that they could not” (Sepúlveda 154).

Parents are willing to sacrifice everything for their children, and to see their children live better lives than they could. America is a beacon of hope to these parents, and if America can bestow upon their children the means to advance in the world, America is where their children must be.

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”             Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                                    

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“The Dream of America: Immigration 1870-1920”             Chapter 5: The Melting Pot                                                    

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“Poverty, political repression, and religious persecution riddled Europe from the 1870s through World War I.  Meanwhile, America’s reputation as a nation of cheap land and stunning riches continued to grow. As one history of U.S. immigration commented, the peoples of Europe recognized that ‘in America there were still frontiers to explore, room to expand, new directions to try’” (Hillstrom 31).

The dream of America came to people’s thoughts because of the availability of land during this time.  Very few, however, actually succeeded in their dreams and made money off of hard work and effort.

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“No Human is Illegal” #whatmakesanAmerican

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“No Human is Illegal” #whatmakesanAmerican

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“Banners bearing the day’s rallying cries—WE ARE HERE TO STAY; END DEPORTATIONS/END CRIMINALIZATION/END OUR PAIN!!!; TÚ, YO, TODOS SOMOS AMERICA [YOU, I, ALL ARE AMERICA]—covered the banisters and were otherwise hung in abundance” (Sepúlveda 160).

Sepúlveda was at a church where a rally was being held. The focus of the rally was this: immigrants are Americans. America is a land of immigrants, and those that have immigrated to the United States recently are no less American than those that immigrated 150 years ago.

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Sepúlveda was speaking with a man who was eligible for citizenship. The man told Sepúlveda, “‘I think back to persecutions throughout history and wonder just how many people would have been saved from exile, or torture, or death if they had sworn off their beliefs and identities? That’s how I view citizenship: an offer to give up myself in order to be given the rights of someone else. I don’t want to swear fealty to a nation that won’t take others like me. Think of African Americans and women suffragettes, who, until they were granted formal citizenship on their own terms, were treated like second-class citizens—I mean, 🤬, they still are. And that’s what I’d be if I became a citizen—second class—and that’s no citizenship at all” (Sepúlveda 163).

To this man, citizenship held more meaning than most American-born citizens even consider. Citizenship was a pledge to defend the United States at all costs, and sacrificing identity in order to become a part of the masses. To this man, the costs were too high; he'd rather live in fear of deportation than commit to a country with principles and morals he disagreed with.