What was life like for immigrants in the 1800s

A large portion of this extraordinary growth can be attributed to European immigrants. During this time, many Britons, Germans, and those of Scandinavian descent crossed the Atlantic and landed in America. Instead, they faced a variety of struggles that will be discussed later on in the article.

Especially in rural communities, Irish immigrants were generally welcomed and easily found work. A s book by an Irish-Catholic priest encouraged Irish immigration by explaining the ease of obtaining land and traveling in the United States:. Louis to New York, it now takes less than two days in time and not more than twenty-five dollars in money; and from San Francisco, the trip is made in six or seven days, at a total expense of about one hundred and fifty dollars.

The inference is plain that the emigrant of today has many advantages over his predecessor of some years back. But the advantages here alluded to are trifling when compared with the increased facilities of obtaining good and cheap land in every State and Territory of the Union. German immigrants were similarly encouraged to immigrate to the United States. In his Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America , Prussian lawyer Gottfried Duden detailed the advantages of life in America, particularly how it avoided many of the societal and political problems present in nineteenth-century German society.

Duden preached that America was a bastion of cheap and available land, especially in the western states and territories. He encouraged Germans to escape the political chaos and limited economic opportunities of Germany to start a new, freer life on the American prairie. Moreover, these immigrants were overwhelmingly Catholic or Greek Orthodox, or Jewish, and unfamiliar with a democratic government.

The large influx of Catholic immigrants into the United States in the mid- to late-nineteenth century drastically changed the perception of Catholicism in America.

In the early s, the American Catholic population was a small sect of English Catholics who were generally well educated and wealthy. However, following the Irish potato famine of the s and the immigration of Eastern European Catholics later in the century, the American Catholic population became a much more diverse group who came from many different countries and spoke many different languages.

In the s, Catholics accounted for only five percent of all Americans, but by they were seventeen percent of the total population and were the largest religious group in the United States. To combat this discrimination, many American Catholics took refuge in the Catholic Church. Another group that came to America in large numbers in the late nineteenth century were Jews. Over two and a half million Eastern European Jews were forced out of their homelands by government persecution and economic hardships.

Prior to the s, there were very few restrictions on immigration into the United States. Starting in the s, though, the federal government faced increasing pressure from the American people to restrict the flow of immigrants—particularly Chinese laborers entering into California. Americans began to associate many of the societal ills related to urbanization—such as overcrowding, the spread of disease, and lack of jobs—with incoming immigrants.

In , the federal government attempted to address those concerns by reforming immigration policy with the Immigration Act of Those who failed to show this were shipped back to their homelands. The Immigration Act of did, however, made an exemption for political refugees. This was consistent with the American tradition of acting as a safe haven for those persecuted by other governments.

The second piece of immigration legislation that Congress passed in was the Chinese Exclusion Act of An newspaper article from the Wisconsin State Journal outlines much of the racial motivation behind the legislation:. His race has outlived every other because it is homogeneous, and for that reason alone it has imposed its religion and peculiarities upon its conquerors and still lived.

If immigration is not checked now, when it is within manageable limits, it will be too late to check it. The Chinese Exclusion Act of also had economic motives.

His shelter is the straw stack and his food is anything that he can get. The great wheat growers, in their immense operations, are thus relieved from employing continuous labor, and the result is large farming to the exclusion of small American homes. In the manufacturing districts, the result is hoodlumism, which drives the young of both classes to idleness in the street.

The researchers demonstrate this through a cleverly identified natural experiment. At the time, immigrants to the US travelled to their new homes in the interior of the country primarily by railroad. If a town was connected to the railroad, immigrants were more likely to settle there. And although migration was high throughout this period, there were certain years when events, usually political or weather related, made even more people want to leave their home country and come to the US.

If a county was first connected to the railroad during one of these boom years, it received an unusually high number of immigrants. Places that were first connected in more subdued years received fewer immigrants. Whether a county was connected to the railroad during a boom year was pure happenstance, the researchers establish, making this a perfect natural experiment to understand the long-term effects of immigration.

The researchers believe the late 19th and early 20th century immigrants stimulated growth because they were complementary to the needs of local economies at that time.

Low-skilled newcomers were supplied labor for industrialization, and higher-skilled arrivals helped spur innovations in agriculture and manufacturing. The data also show that the long-term benefits of immigration did not come at short-term cost to the economy as whole.

Because most immigrants were poor when they arrived, they often lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where rents for the crowded apartment buildings, called tenements, were low. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is in a building that used to be a tenement and it tells the story of immigrants in the City. It was built in the s and could house 20 families, four on each floor.

Each apartment had only three rooms: a living or "front" room, a kitchen, and a tiny bedroom. Often seven or more people lived in each apartment.