Early Colonization

• Colonization began shortly after Europeans discovered the "New World." Early colonization began in 1584. By the early 1600s, a number of colonies were well established on the east coast of the United States. Immigration to the new colonies was slow during this period and throughout the 1700s.
  
  

Mass Migration

• By the early 1800s, a number of social and economic conditions in Europe triggered far more people to emigrate to the United States. Between 1820 and 1880, over 15 million people emigrated to the United States. The end of the Napoleonic wars left large numbers of young veterans who weren't prepared for work in an industrialized economy. Many of these young men emigrated to the United States with hopes of a better life. As these immigrants integrated into the United States, they became the first group of migrant workers as the United States industrialized. Large groups that entered the United States during this period were Irish Catholics. These immigrants faced one of the first "nativist" movements and faced discrimination from people whose families had immigrated to the United States between 1600 and 1800. During this time, a small number of Chinese emigrated to the American West where they faced intense and often violent hatred from previous European immigrants. Numerous Chinatowns were burned and hundreds of Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched. This period saw the beginning of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited entry of Chinese people into the United States.
  
  

A Flood of Immigrants

• Innovations in travel made it easier for people to emigrate to the United States. Whereas previous immigrants came by sailboat, steamships provided faster and safer transportation to larger numbers of people. Migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s saw larger numbers of people coming from southern and eastern Europe fleeing economic instability, as those areas began the process of industrialization that had begun in Western Europe. Nearly 25 million Europeans entered the United States during this period, coming primarily from Greece, Italy, Poland, Hungary and other Slavic-speaking nations. Most of these immigrants moved to cities and became the bulk of the American industrial labor pool. Many of these immigrants faced xenophibic discrimination from the descendants of previous immigrants who viewed themselves as "natives."
  
  

Race-Based Immigration Laws

• Although the first race-based immigration law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it was limited in scope. The first formal omnibus immigration law where race was a primary component was the National Origins Act of 1921. This Act, for the first time, restricted the total number of immigrants who were allowed to enter the United States. In addition, quotas and categories were created to favor immigration by people from northern and western Europe. Numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were severely limited, and Asians were deemed unworthy of entry into the United States. During this period, immigration between Mexico and the Caribbean was completely open and virtually unregulated. People moved freely between the United States and these areas. These discriminatory immigration laws remained in place until 1965.
  
  

Immigration After 1965

• The passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed race-based restrictions on immigration. Part of President Lyndon B. Jonson's Great Society programs, the intent of this law was not to stimulate immigration from areas previously banned or discouraged, such as Asia, the Middle East and Africa. When this Act was written, people assumed that immigrants would continue to be primarily from northern and western Europe. Between passage of this Act and they year 2000, immigration swelled from places like China, South Korea, Pakistan, India and other Asian countries. In addition, many people emigrated from African nations to the United States.
  
  

Current Immigration

• By the year 2000, the number of immigrants to the United States had dropped to the levels seen in 1900. However, by the late first decade of the 21st century, a strong "nativist" movement developed that was hostile toward current and recent immigrants. In addition, ethnic tensions developed between groups of older immigrants and groups of more recent immigrants. Both groups faced distrust and discrimination by people whose families had emigrated in earlier centuries. Many of these "nativist" groups have pushed for everything from complete isolation of the United States by sealing the borders to implementing migrant worker programs to exploit the lower wages of workers from other countries without conferring the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.