The United States has approached immigration quite differently than many other countries have, with a far more liberal policy on permitting naturalization of citizenship than the vast majority of the world. In the Constitution, Section 8 authorized Congress to regulate commerce, which was generally regarded as license to regulate immigration as well (LeMay, 1987). The first regulation was passed in 1790, with a simple two-year waiting period placed on immigrants who wanted to become citizens. That is a far cry from not only the current waiting period but also the even more stringent process that conservatives would like to enact. It is also much more liberal than the quota systems that were set up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the country has become more and more populous, opportunities have dwindled, with the result that Americans have wanted those opportunities restricted to current citizens. In the “Old Immigration” period, which ran from 1820 to 1880, the American policy was regarded as an “open door.” Of course, that was before free public education, health care, and other benefits were part of American life – and there were huge expanses of land to fill. In the decades after 1880, and continuing to the present day, immigrating to the United States became far more complicated.
Between 1820 and 1880, the largest groups of immigrants came from western and northern Europe – mostly Scandinavian, Irish and Germans. The busiest time periods were between 1845 and 1854, which featured mostly Irish and Germans, and between 1865 and 1875, which also featured British and Scandinavian immigrants, along with the first two groups (LeMay, 1987). Between those two waves, almost seven million Germans entered the United States during that time. The second largest group was the Irish, who would end up sending around five million immigrants between 1820 and 1920 (Shenton and Kenny, 1997).
Each of these cultural groups created neighborhoods or residential clusters in which they could maintain many of their traditions from their countries of origin – assimilation was not on their minds. This becomes ironic, given the immediate assimilation that some expect immigrants in modern times to accomplish, but the people coming from other countries still lived, mentally, in their former milieu. As Kerby Miller has argued, this informed their arrival in the United States in emphatic ways. For example, when many of the Irish immigrants arrived, they had come from a mostly agricultural, often preliterate culture centered around Gaelic ways. They arrived in an industrial culture, with corporate instead of subsistence agriculture, and had very few tools with which to survive, initially. Many Irish immigrants simply had to leave, because of conditions in that country, and they ended up blaming the British for the fact that they had to leave their homes and come to an unfriendly, uncomfortable place in the United States (Miller, 2001). As a result, the United States became a source for much of the ordnance and the philosophy that would feed the struggle for Irish independence in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As time went by and opportunities grew more and more scarce, the window of immigration would shut more and more tightly. The time period when America was an open place for anyone was a unique point in history – one wonders if there will ever be as much available room for the asking for humanity again.
Works Cited
LeMay, M. (1987). From open door to Dutch door: An analysis of U.S. immigration
policy since 1820. New York: ABC-CLIO.
Miller, K. (2001). Journey of hope: The story of Irish immigration to America. New York:
Chronicle Books.
Shenton, J. and Kenny, K. (1997). Ethnicity and immigration. From The New American
History, Foner, E. (ed). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
