United States People

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European and African Immigration in the Colonies

The Europeans and Africans added new layers of complexity to the territories named the New World. European military technology, commercial wealth, and immunity to diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis generally gave Europeans an advantage over the original inhabitants. Yet the Native Americans knew the land and were skilled negotiators, eloquent orators, and fierce fighters. Wresting control of the land from the indigenous peoples took the newcomers some 300 years to accomplish.

Colonists established a variety of outposts for their European empires (see Colonial America). By the 17th and 18th centuries, the French had settlements around the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi River, and at New Orleans. The Spanish established settlements in Florida, the Southwest, and California. The British entrenched themselves in New England and the South, while the Russians settled on the West Coast, and the Swedes and the Dutch on the East Coast. This short list fails to capture the ethnic complexity of early European settlement in what is now the United States. The various settlements included Scots, Welsh, Irish, Germans, Finns, Greeks, and Italians, as well as Maya, Aztec, and African slaves.

European settlements, both in the North and the South, depended on the skills and labor of these indentured European servants and, particularly after 1700, of enslaved Africans. The majority of the early European immigrants were not free—60 percent in the 17th century and 51 percent in the 18th century arrived as indentured servants or prisoners (see Indentured Servitude). However, these Europeans could hope to achieve freedom at the end of their servitude. Africans were treated differently; neither they nor their children could realistically hope to attain freedom. A few Africans arriving in the New World were free men sailing the Atlantic as part of an economic network connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The vast majority, however, were enslaved, purchased in various parts of Africa to work on European plantations, farms, and homesteads (see Slavery in the United States). Most Africans came from coastal West Africa and the Niger River region. Smaller numbers came from central, southern, and eastern Africa. Twenty-one percent of the population on the eve of the American Revolution (1775-1783) was of African descent, almost all working as slaves.

Ethnically and linguistically the African migration was as diverse as the European; culturally it was more so. Most Africans caught in the slave trade were skilled farmers, weavers, and metallurgists; smaller numbers were herders, hunters, foragers, or city dwellers. Some had been enslaved in their homelands and some were African royalty (see Atlantic Slave Trade). They included Muslims, Christians, and others who worshiped one god, as well as those who worshiped multiple deities, such as animists and ancestor worshipers. These involuntary immigrants faced a hard life in the New World. Their labor and skills were exploited, their specific national origins were forgotten, and their cultural traditions were partially suppressed. Yet Africans in America constructed flexible family networks that allowed their population to grow and expand in spite of enslavement. The family protected its members from some of the harshest features of enslavement and preserved elements of religious belief, vocabulary, poetic tradition, family values, craft and artistic practice, and other aspects of African heritage.

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European American populations generally thrived as they expanded their control over the continent. The predominately British Protestant settlements on the East Coast grew rapidly during the colonial period because of the immigration of women and men, nearly all of whom married and had many children. Colonial American women, free and enslaved, gave birth every two years on average, pushing the natural increase (the surplus of births over deaths) of Britain’s American colonies to twice that of the Old World. In addition, Britain absorbed the smaller Dutch and Swedish colonies on the East Coast before the end of the 17th century. The more isolated French, Russian, and Spanish Roman Catholic settlements to the west remained relatively small, in part because few women resided at these military posts, missionary compounds, and trading stations. Their geographic isolation inhibited immigration, keeping growth rates low and populations small.

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Diversity and Assimilation in American Society

The American victory in the Revolutionary War united 13 of the English-speaking settlements into the largest and most powerful political unit in the territory, even though those first 13 states hugging the eastern coast seem small compared with the country’s eventual size. As a result of the Revolution, approximately 71,500 people out of a populace of some 2.5 million fled the new United States. Some were Loyalists—political or economic refugees whose loyalties to Great Britain remained strong; others were blacks seeking refuge from slavery. Immigration and the commercial slave trade after the war quickly restored the population to its former level. The Revolution also opened up the area west of the Appalachian mountains to settlement, as fur traders and farmers were no longer confined by British settlement restrictions. Pioneering citizens, immigrants, and slaves moved west, displacing Native Americans who had hoped to preserve their cultures undisturbed by the expanding United States.

The 17th and 18th centuries saw a growing importation of Africans into North America. After 1808 U.S. law forbade the importation of slaves from abroad, although some smuggling of slaves continued. Few people from Africa chose to come to the United States voluntarily, where the free African population was small, considered second-class citizens, and confined largely to the northern states. Large numbers of Europeans migrated to the United States in the early national period, drawn by the promise of freedom, cheap land in the West, and jobs in the first factories of the emerging industrial age. The influx of Europeans, the end of the slave trade, and the ongoing wars removing Native Americans meant that some of the racial diversity of the population was diminishing. By the early decades of the 19th century, a greater proportion of Americans were of western European and Protestant heritage than at the time of the Revolution.

Over the course of the 19th century, the United States gradually absorbed the French colonists in the upper Midwest and in New Orleans, Louisiana; the Spanish and Russian colonists in the South, West, and Northwest; and the territories of the Hawaiian people and other indigenous groups. Sometimes these territories were added by diplomacy, sometimes by brute force. European visitors were surprised at the diversity in nationalities and in religious and secular beliefs in early America, as well as the number of intermarriages between people of differing European heritages. There were also cross-racial births, sometimes voluntary and sometimes by force, but rarely within legal marriages. The population continued to grow through migration as well, driven in part by English, Irish, and German settlers who came in large numbers around 1848 to escape political repression and food shortages in Europe.

By 1860, 86 percent of Americans counted in the census were white (72 percent native-born white) and 14 percent black. (Most Native Americans were not included in census figures until the late 19th century.) Although the country had become more uniform, it was not homogeneous enough for some citizens. They sought at various times between the Revolution and the American Civil War (1861-1865) to delay the naturalization of foreign immigrants, to send African Americans to Liberia or elsewhere, or to discriminate against Roman Catholics. But the German and Irish immigrants of the midcentury gradually won acceptance, and free African Americans insisted on an American identity, pushing for an end to slavery and for full citizenship.

The insecure status of even free African Americans in the middle decades of the 19th century caused thousands of blacks to emigrate from the United States to Canada, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. This law required that slaves who escaped to free states be returned to their masters. Within a year, 10,000 black Americans fled to safety in Canada. By 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, 50,000 African Americans resided in Canada.

The American Civil War briefly interrupted European immigration. At the end of the war some slaveowners moved to Brazil and other places where slavery was still legal. With slavery abolished in the United States and former slaves’ status as American citizens constitutionally guaranteed, 30,000 African Americans returned from Canada to rejoin family and friends. The constitutional promises of the post-Civil War era were soon discarded. Racism in both the North and the South confined African Americans to second-class citizenship in which political and civil rights were ignored. Discrimination by race was declared constitutional in 1896 (see Plessy v. Ferguson).

The immigrant population changed dramatically after the Civil War. The majority of white immigrants had traditionally come from western Europe, but during the second half of the 19th century, many immigrants came from central, southern, eastern, and northern Europe. This influx brought in larger numbers of Roman Catholics. And for the first time there were substantial communities of Orthodox Christians and Jews. On the West Coast, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, mostly men, arrived to work in agriculture and on the railroads.

From 1880 to 1914, peak years of immigration, more than 22 million people migrated to the United States. As with earlier arrivals, some immigrants returned home after a few years. Some maintained separate ethnic and religious identities in urban neighborhoods as well as in the smaller towns of the West, while others blended into American society through marriage, education, language, employment, politics, and sometimes religion.

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Restrictions on Immigration

Late-19th-century immigrants, with their different ways and seemingly strange religions, made American voters anxious enough to enact the first laws restricting immigration. Social Darwinism, with its beliefs that national characteristics or ethnic traditions were inherited, led Americans to view immigrants from nonindustrialized nations as not only economically backward but biologically inferior. It gave more-established, native-born Americans a supposedly scientific excuse for blocking immigration. Convicts and prostitutes were barred in 1875. Then paupers, the so-called mentally defective, and all Chinese immigrants were excluded in 1882. Contract workers, who were often Italian or Chinese, were also banned in the 1880s. Japanese immigration was stopped in 1907.

By 1910 African Americans made up only 11 percent of the population, and Native Americans constituted only 0.3 percent, their smallest proportions ever. For Native Americans, the population decline was due in part to the military defeat of the last of the independent nations and in part to their impoverishment on reservations. Segregation, lynching campaigns, and poverty slowed the growth of the African American population. Even though more than three-quarters of Americans were native-born whites in 1910, many citizens still felt insecure. The settlement house movement, whose most prominent advocate was social reformer Jane Addams, sought to speed the Americanization of foreign-born urban residents through education and social services. This was an insufficient response for some American citizens, and additional restrictions were placed on immigration. After 1917 only literate individuals were admitted.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 convinced many Americans that all foreigners were Bolsheviks, anarchists, or criminals (see Bolshevism, Anarchism). Fearing the importation of radical political ideas, labor unrest, and attempts at subversion, many Americans retreated into isolationism, the idea that America should separate itself from the rest of the world. In 1921 and 1924 Congress mandated a quota system for immigration, which soon became based on European ethnicities present in the United States in 1890, before many eastern Europeans had arrived. This granted 80 percent of the 150,000 annual visas to immigrants from western Europe, leaving only 30,000 visas for immigrants from other countries.

The Great Depression of the 1930s only sharpened feelings against foreigners in America. With anti-immigrant feelings running high and with jobs being scarce, more people emigrated from the United States than arrived during the 1930s, the first period of negative migration since the Revolution. The emigrants included an estimated 500,000 Mexican Americans, many of them U.S. citizens or legal immigrants, who were forced out of the country on the grounds they were taking jobs from supposedly real Americans, that is, those of western European descent. This decade also saw the lowest population growth rate in the history of the United States.

Not only did old-stock Americans fear eastern and southern Europeans, Hispanics, and Asians, but anti-Semitism was also commonplace in the early 20th century. This was especially true after the turn of the century, when immigration produced a substantial eastern European Jewish presence in the cities. After World War I (1914-1918), the children of these immigrants sought admission to high schools and colleges, and they entered skilled and professional occupations, and many Christians responded with fear. Quotas enforced during the 1920s limited immigration from countries with large numbers of Jewish emigrants. Colleges, professional schools, and businesses barred Jews entirely or admitted only a few during this period. Through the first half of the 20th century, towns and individual householders barred Jews from buying real estate by including restrictive covenants in property deeds, a practice known as “gentleman’s clauses.” Although 102,000 Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany were admitted into the United States before World War II (1939-1945), many more were refused entrance. As a consequence of this policy, some died in German labor and death camps.

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Immigration in 20th- and 21st-Century America

After the war, revelations about the full extent of Nazi racism in Europe led to reevaluations of American immigration policy and to special legislative exemptions to the quota system. More than 93,000 Jews immigrated to the United States from 1946 to 1949. War brides, displaced persons, refugees, orphans, and other people caught in postwar political changes or in the later conflicts of the Cold War were also granted permission to enter the country. At first these were Russians, Czechs, and Belorussians, but later they included Cubans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, Iranians, and others. The number of immigrants was relatively small, and Americans thought of themselves as relatively homogeneous in the 1950s and 1960s, a feeling bolstered by the all-white images dominating the nation’s television screens. In 1960, 83 percent of Americans were native-born whites.

The civil rights movement, which peaked from 1955 to 1965, renewed concerns about racism and issued a clear call to fulfill constitutional guarantees of human equality. Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholic sentiment, and other forms of discrimination became less acceptable, as did the image of the true American as white, northern European, and Protestant. This change in attitude helped bring an end to national quotas for immigrants. In 1965 family members of those already living in the United States were given priority in immigrating without regard to national origin, as were highly skilled individuals, but migration from Asia was placed under a separate quota system that applied only to the Far East. By 1978 this provision was lifted, and all immigrants were treated equally.

Because of changes in U.S. immigration law and in economic and political conditions worldwide, the number of immigrants to America resurged in the last quarter of the 20th century. Immigrants from the Pacific Rim, including Filipinos, Chinese, and Koreans, as well as immigrants from American dependencies in the South Pacific, arrived on the West Coast and settled throughout the United States. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans, Caribbean peoples, and South Americans sought asylum and opportunity in the United States, particularly in the Southeast and Southwest and in large cities. Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Iranians, and others sought an outlet for their skills. These new flows of immigrants added Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism to the mix of religious beliefs in America. Hispanic Americans became the fastest-growing segment of the population by the end of the 20th century. The effect of immigration was not felt uniformly throughout the United States. Immigrants tended to congregate in the more densely populated areas of the United States: California, Florida, Texas, and the Northeast.

Although most immigrants entered the country legally, some did not. According to official estimates, approximately 5 million illegal immigrants resided in the United States in 1996, most from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Canada. Concern over immigration, particularly illegal immigration, increased during the 1980s and 1990s. In the last decades of the 20th century, immigration laws were amended to restrict the flow of all immigrants, to deport illegal aliens, and to deny benefits to those already living in the country legally. This wave of antiforeign sentiment was based on fears of tax increases for schooling immigrant children, for social services, and for health care, although illegal immigrants who work (albeit without legal status) pay wage and sales taxes that help support education and social services. Some citizens were also concerned about increased competition for jobs, even though immigrants frequently fill positions that American citizens do not want.

Other Americans, however, welcomed these new additions to American culture. Some employers depended on immigrants to harvest the nation’s crops, sew garments, or wash dishes in restaurants, jobs that many U.S. citizens found unattractive. Doctors and health professionals recruited from overseas were often hired to staff small-town hospitals in places where American professionals felt socially isolated. Businesses and universities welcomed foreign-born engineers and computer programmers because relatively few American students pursued these fields of study. A lottery system for entrance visas was designed to maintain the diversity of the immigrant pool by selecting a limited number of migrants by chance rather than by national origin.

According to the 2000 census, 70.9 percent of Americans were non-Hispanic whites, and the populations of blacks, Hispanics (who may be of any race), Native Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islanders were increasing. The Native American and African American populations grew, reversing 19th-century declines in their share of the total population. Migration from the Caribbean and smaller flows from various parts of Africa created the first substantial influx of free people of African descent in the nation’s history. The Census Bureau released updated estimates for the diversity of Americans in 2006, based on information compiled by regularly sampling thousands of households in 2005. Non-Hispanic whites were about 67 percent of the total population. Minorities made up 33 percent of Americans, with Hispanics the largest group at 14.4 percent and blacks second at 12.8 percent. The number of immigrants increased over the five-year period since the last census to about 12.4 percent of the population. Over half the immigrants came from Latin America, followed in number by groups from Asia.

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Racism

These broad categories only hint at the full ethnic and racial diversity of the American population; conversely, the use of separate categories masks the many characteristics Americans share. The United States has been described as a melting pot where ethnic and racial groups shed their specific traits and join with other Americans to create a new identity. The nation has also been described as a salad bowl where people of different backgrounds mingle at work and school, in civic responsibilities, and as consumers, but where cultural traits remain distinct.

In the 18th century American statesman Benjamin Franklin feared that Germans could never be assimilated because of their foreign ways. In the middle of the 19th century many thought that Irish Catholics would subvert the American way of life. At the end of the 19th century the Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Italians, and others were mistrusted. Yet these groups eventually became part of mainstream America. At the end of the 20th century, many people consider newer Asian immigrants, Spanish-speaking peoples, and Muslims as permanently alien presences. If the past is a guide, these groups too will meld into the general American citizenry.

The main exceptions to full acceptance remain Native Americans and African Americans. Native Americans have a dual status based both on the existence of reservations and vibrant tribal traditions, and on the prejudices of many non-Native Americans. African Americans bear the brunt of the oldest and most deeply rooted of American prejudices.

Initial contacts between Africans and Europeans often began with misunderstanding. Africans at first thought white-skinned people were ghosts looking for people to eat, since white was the color of death in much of Africa. Europeans sometimes assumed black-skinned peoples were followers of the devil and therefore sinful, since black was the traditional color associated with lies, sin, and evil in the Western world. Differences in religion, language, and customs also led to misunderstandings, even while economic similarities favored trade between African kingdoms and European empires.

When European merchants brought the first enslaved Africans to work in their New World, they justified the enslavement on the premise that Africans were not Christian and were supposedly not civilized—in other words, the Africans were considered culturally inferior. By the 18th century, many enslaved African Americans had converted to Protestant Christianity, spoke English, and expressed a desire for freedom. A few people of African descent had, against all the odds, become poets, doctors, almanac publishers, plantation owners, and antislavery activists. It became harder for whites to claim that Africans would always be culturally inferior. Pro-slavery whites then began to justify permanent enslavement by asserting that Africans were somehow biologically inferior to Europeans. Whites claimed that anything accomplished by people with black skin was inferior, that blacks were intellectually and morally incapable of self-government, and that blacks needed to be controlled by whites. This so-called scientific racism based on presumed biological differences was useful in slaveholding areas for protecting the economic interests of slaveholders and useful in non-slaveholding areas for uniting all the different, and potentially conflicting, European ethnicities under the label “white.”

Racial discrimination grew out of the practice of enslavement but outlasted the institution of slavery. European newcomers could find common ground with the majority of Americans by joining in the denigration of African Americans. Poorer whites or socially marginal whites could feel superior by virtue of their skin color, even if they were not economically successful or fully accepted by their peers. Racism helped to create a sense of unity among white Americans by defining who was a full citizen. Racism also united African Americans through shared experiences of discrimination and suffering. As a consequence, white racism also promoted a sense of unity among black Americans, no matter what their backgrounds.

Freedom in the wake of the Civil War was a first step in eradicating this prejudice. The civil rights era of the mid-20th century saw even more advancement, but prejudice against black Americans has not been entirely eliminated. At the beginning of the 21st century, a relatively small number of white people still opposed a race-blind America that would deny them a feeling of racial superiority. Some of these people form militia, fascist, and vigilante groups that use violence against African Americans, the federal government, and others who challenge their restrictive views. The majority of Americans, however, while sometimes reluctant to change, believe that all people are created equal.

Americans tend to think in terms of a biracial, separated society, even though whites and blacks have jointly built the United States, and even though the family histories of whites, blacks, and other races are often intermixed. In addition, the two groups share many beliefs (such as freedom, liberty, and civil rights) and customs (from poetry to sports and from work to holidays). Yet the idea of racial difference, of superiority and inferiority, still provides the basis for many social, cultural, political, economic, and religious divisions in the United States.