Chapter 14

Of all the groups that have emigrated into the United States, none have successfully transitioned into American life than the Asian American population. While these people definitely faced discrimination and prejudice from White Americans, the demise of the Chinese Exclusion Act and coming of the 1965 Immigrantion Act allowed Asian minorities to find work and eventually move up in life so that the next generation has better opportunities. Another factor that contributed to the increase of Asian American people and influence was Hawaii's admission into the Union in 1959, which enabled many senators and  representatives of Asian descent to move up into the core of American politics in Washington. Given their cultural backgrounds, Asian Americans have been proven to be less likely to end up in jail and more so to head to college than the average American. Thus, they become known as the model minority - the group of immigrants that has set the bar for other descendants from a foreign country to reach if they are to succeed in the United States. However, there are some differences between the distinct Asian groups in terms of the median age within a particular group and the chances of these people's culture being around in the United States.

One such group, the Japanese Americans had faced a steady decline of their people coming to America during the the 1920s and '30s. The immigration patterns were much more rapid, though, a little less steep than other the other Asian ethnic groups. Interestingly enough, when the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, there was still very few Japanese coming to the United States. While many immigrants from Japan did arrive during the 1950s and early 1960s, the one reason why they didn't emigrate after 1965 was due to the fact that if the act had been passed immediately after World War Two, a war torn Japan would have been enough of a push factor for people to reestablish themselves in the United States. Since Japanese immigration slowed from the '60s onwards, the Japanese American population started to slow down a bit, essentially due to the great number of births that overcame the number of deaths within this ethnic population. While they were becoming an aging group towards the end of the 20th Century, it should be noted that Japanese Americans have very well financially and for the most part, fall within the range of middle to lower class in American society. Although the average income for a Japanese American family wasn't higher than their educational expectations, it was higher than what most Americans had.

The experience for every Chinese American was greatly different from their Japanese counterparts. Since the 1940s, the number of Chinese immigrants has gone up quite a bit and many of these people weren't directly from China. Newcomers came from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and different parts of Southeast Asia. Even some ethnic Chinese arrived from Vietnam as refugees and have continued to identify themselves as such. Compared to the Japanese American families of the 20th Century, Chinese American families were mainly within incomes that were along the poverty line. Both groups do share similar educational status which enabled Chinese Americans, who went as far as college, to speak out against the "silent" issue of their people still living in poverty within San Francisco or being anything but the model minority.

Chapt 13

Great changes occurred in the old immigrant/quota system in the post World War Two era. Up into the 1965, the Immigration Act of 1924 set the basic guidelines to immigration law in the United States in regards to how newcomers can legally enter this country. The demise of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the '40s ended the long, racist system that was a huge product of the 1920s American attitudes towards immigrants. Filipinos received better opportunities to migrate into America mainly due to small quotas and the celebration of finally gaining independence in their home country. Even so, strict admissions were still laid for most Asian immigrants (Japanese, Korean, Southeast as United States politicans were still debating over whether the old or a new immigration system should be put into place.

A lot of controversy was sweeping across America as citizens and Congress members were divided over "lowering the barriers" of the country's borders and how strict our immigrant policies should be. Some political leaders, such as Senator Patrick A. McGarran, though once a believer in the national origins concept of protecting America's borders, found himself siding with the broad notion of naturalizing newcomers to the United States. The reason for Americans being uncertain about allowing more immigrants in was due not only to the masses of Europeans arriving from a war torn continent, but the direct fear of Communism spreading to this country since it was already on the rise in many nations. Others, though caught up in the fears of the twenties rather than the realities of the forties, felt this massive immigrant movement was some kind of plot to sneak Jews into the United States. I was always curious about the anti-Semitic mindset of Americans after World War Two, especially since these were the people our troops found in the concentration camps and provided them with food, water, and clothing. Obviously, many of the principles and aspects of American ideology that turned the original thirteen colonies into the United States evolved around Christian (mainly Protestant) ideals; people in America have historically looked down on others outside their way of life, particularly Jews since they have been considered historical enemies of Christian life. It can infered that since many Anglo-Americans after World War Two didn't learn about the horrors of the Holocaust that sympathy towards many Jewish immigrants was, for the most part, non-existent.

The Immigration Act of 1965 accomplished more than what it authors could have forseen. It helped to change the face of American attitudes towards immigrants and enabled quotas for people from countries that had more applicants than quota spaces in the system. The reform went through three provisions: 1) The quota system was phased out over a five year period, with numbers of immigrants that were released into a pool of distribution, 2) Natives of any country only received more than 10% of the newly authorized quota numbers, and 3) A seven-person  board is to be established to advise the president, along with two appointed members by the Speaker of the House and five other members from Congress. The president, after receieving the recommendations from this board, would have the authority to allow 50% of unallocated numbers be preserved for people at a disadvantage with the new quota system and 20% to all other refugees. In short, this immigration reform helped to distribute evenly the number of people coming into the United States, while helping those who aren't qualified for the quota system at the same time.

Chapt 11 New Immigration

While the great immigration that started in 19th Century ended around the end of WWII, people never stopped to come to the United States for a better life. From the Roaring Twenties to the defeat of the Axis Powers, nearly five million immigrants came in droves to the United States, despite these groups being historically ignored for some time. What's interesting about this period of emigration to America is that the records of people going in and out of the United States kept going up for a few years, until following the Great Depression (1932-1935) did more remigrated than immigrated into this country. Before World War One, around 90% of immigrants were primarily European and the focus of the Immigration Act of 1924 was to attract more of these people, mainly from the British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian nations. This act was big, considering that the people of America's former WWI enemy, Germany, made up one fifth of the European immigration in 1924, jumping up to a tenth of the total of immigrants that settled in the United States.

It never occurred to me that the American Immigration Act of 1924 was set to attract people from the northern most countries in Europe, but it makes sense for a couple of reasons. These immigrants were essentially white which provided the United States with the excuse to increase and purify White American society. Although the Irish were historically discriminated for their customs and religion, eventually America came to accept them for their motives in political life and mainly since they were white. It was definitely the same case with the British, Germans, and Scandinavians, but most likely due to the similarities they shared with Americans as far as religion, customs, and perspectives on government were concerned. This connects a bit with Ben Franklin's thoughts of increasing the number of white people in America, except he regarded the Germans as a swarthy group and never recognized the Irish (likely since they were Catholics and American colonists never thought too well of them, as did the English).

Around this time, the number of immigrants from Canada and Mexico increased by 50%. This was a complex situation for these people (particularly the Mexicans) since there were from within the "New World" and not subject to the quota system. Provisions were made in 1921 to allow wives and children of United States citizens be nonquota persons, but not if they were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Others allowed in or back into America included resident aliens returning from visits back home, religious ministers and their families, domestic servants, and people practicing in a professional field. In the case of European immigrants, the British and Irish quotas was around sixty-five thousand annually, but it was never filled up. As restrictions on immigration got tighter, more people began to step into the United States illegally whether by fraud, jumping ship, crossing the Mexican or Canadian border without a visa, or through other means of entering. This era of immigration testifies to the notion that people of all nationalities will go to any lengths to start anew in the United States, even if the consequences of their arrival are undesirable. 

Suggested midterm questions from Chapt 8, Coming to America

What was the typical pattern of Hungarian immigration in the early 20th Century? Name two push or pull factors that brought this group to the United States.



What were some of the obstacles faced by many Jewish immigrants as they were going to the ships that would take them to America?



In what ways did Polish immgrants maintain their national heritage while residing in the United States?

Daniels Chapt 5, Ethnicity and Race in America

The big question asked back in colonial times and still brought up today, "What is an American?", echoes the United States' struggle of finding its true identity which historically has been given many definitions. What is an American all about, regardless if his or her ancestors's culture originated in North America or not? French author, Michael Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur, had an interesting take when he defined an American as "either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country." He classified America as one the place where "individuals of all races are melted into a new race of men , whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." One can presume Crevecoeur meant Americans of European descent and that his perception of American life is more romanticized than what really made the United States of today. This nation has had a long history of racial prejudice and segregation, in fact, more than most would think during its colonial era. During that time, great conflict occured between the English settlers and their European counterparts.

As such, we know of the destructive conflicts that arose between white settlers and Native Americans that soon changed the face of America forever. What was interesting to me was the amount of cultural hatred the English had towards their European neighbors. At one point, settlers from England were the majority until Africans were brought over for slavery and numerous non-English immigrants arrived. While many English felt the need to establish organizations to help their shrinking community, their culture, law, language and other customs greatly dominated the colonial way of life in America. Many aspects of this system have had a profound effect on how the legal, political, and economic systems work in this country today. Yet, tensions were still high between English Americans and other ethnic groups such as the Germans and the Irish for a number of reasons.

In the case of the Irish, I always knew it was due to the different interpretations of God between Catholics and Christians that spurred the hatred between the two cultures. The American colonies did pass some non-Catholic legislation out of fear of the Irish community growing, even though Catholics were a minority at the time. The mere sight of a Catholic and his ways was enough to frighten colonial Americans into thinking their way of life might be threatened. In time, the religious tensions between Catholics and Christians in the United States soon came to pass.

The majority of German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, but they made up a third of the population. They were looked down for being the one group that didn't seem fully assimilated into colonial society. Ben Franklin himself didn't think too well about Germans, especially since they mistakenly voted for his opponents in a number of elections. Despite the prejudices, the new German Americans thrived as agricultural workers and continued to have great future impacts on this country's prosperity; one of them involving their work in the automobile industry.  

Daniels, Chapt 4, Euro immigration to America

When we think of immigration to the United States, up until recent years, the majority of people who flocked to this country (then colonies) were mainly Europeans from the Western or Northern-most countries. While the first were English, about two fifths of the rest that came around 1790 were from elsewhere in the British Isles. Other groups migrated from Germany, Swedan, and parts of France. I was fascinated by what it took for these continental Europeans to make it all the way to the American colonies and the attitude that helped them through the toughest times.

At the time, Germany was nothing more than a few scattered states with people of diverse backgrounds, ranging from Austrian to Russian. Each of these groups were divided according to their religions (Protestant, Catholic, and Judaism) which proved to be difficult to determine what ethnic groups the German immigrants belonged to, especially the so-called "Deutsch" people who come either from the Rhineland or Switzerland. Colonial Americans were under the impression that these German groups left their country to escape religious persecution, but that was not the case. During the early 18th Century, many Rhinelanders were suffering from the War of Spanish Succession as King Louis XIV's forces went after Germans who sided with the British. The promise of new opportunities in the "New World" gave German immigrants enough incentive to escape their political turmoil. Many ended up in various parts of New York, but more went to Pennsylvania where few immigrants had settled in, so this was a great delight for propietors and European agents to attract more newcomers to the colony. What really shocked me was not just the vastness of Germans in Pennsylvania, but what they really cared for despite the hardships they endured to get to America.

In each family, every person was entitled to a contract of paying for their passage to the New World and to what length of service they'll go into. Children had to work until they were 21 and the adults would serve for three to six years, causing a great separation between family members. When one or more of the family dies en route to the colonies, the surviving members were responsible to pay the fares for not just themselves, but for their deceased parents or relatives as well. Despite these payments, many German immigrants prefered "being slaves in America to being free townsmen" in their home country. The situation back home was that awful enough to keep Germans out for good. In contrast to their English and Irish counterparts, German indentured servants generally had better working and living conditions. Some freely went into that line of work, while others were sold to make good on their contracts of travel. Often, free family members used some of the money they earned from work to help their "unfree" relatives be successful in the American colonies. How well German immigrants handled their rough transition into America says a lot to what it can take for any newcomer, who arrives in this country with the attitude to start a better life, no matter what obstacles they may face coming to or just being in the United States.   

Chapt 3, Daniels, Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade of the colonial period had a very significant role to play in stimulating business investments in the "New World." It is one of the greatest crimes in displacing and mistreating human beings, as well. What surprised me was that this part in American history was greatly ignored for some time, given that the Southern American colonies (and the North for a brief time) prospered from resources, such as sugar and cotton, made by the slaves themselves. While slavery did oppress the human rights of the Africans, in some ways this system is linked with the progression and development of Western and American capitalism.

Apart from producing and exporting products such as textile fabrics, some have argued that the slave trade has brought numerous immigrants to the "New World." However, other historians have argued that slavery had nothing to do with luring foreigners into the United States. I liked how author Maldwyn A. James put it that even if Africans weren't immigrants in a strict sense, their arrival to America helped in the "peopling of the colonies." My understanding is that since slavery did make products used to create clothing and other such fabrics, immigrants and United States citizens were probably pleased with the wide range of resources available for them. Of course, if slavery in America had treated the Africans better, there would have been a more positive outlook of how benefical the system was to American prosperity.

There is much history that, until recently, has been neglected due to popular depictions of slavery and the fact that Africans were a nonliterate culture. The assumption then was that African Americans came from a large continent (Africa) that contributed nothing to the world and was full of nothing but tribes of savages with no sense of culture. Today, we know that Africa was home to one of the most developed civilizations, Egypt, and was the place where hunter-gatherers spread across the continent and eventually into the neighboring land masses. Other glimpses of the Slave trade's history didn't receieve enough attention such as the African slaves who eventually became free, particularly in the North where the abolitionist eventually spurred. Then there was black immigrant population in the Caribbean which would later have great influence on American life through sports, literature, and politics. These groups, while greatly affected by slavery negatively, did impact American culture in a way that would change the face of the country forever. Although they never asked to be brought to the "New World," African slaves and slavery in America each were significant in how they raised the question of what it means to live in Western society and whose rights are meant to be protected.