History of immigration to the United States

Colonial-era immigrants often repaid the cost of transoceanic transportation by becoming indentured servants in which the new employer paid the ship's captain.

Tens of thousands of English Puritans arrived, mostly from the East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex),[4] and settled in Boston, Massachusetts and the adjacent areas from around 1629 to 1640 to create a land dedicated to their religion.

[5] Plymouth Colony was founded by a group of European settlers known as the pilgrims who had left Europe to separate from the Church of England and wanted religious freedom.

Immigration to the New England colonies after 1640 and the start of the English Civil War decreased to less than 1% (about equal to the death rate) in nearly all of the years prior to 1845.

[8] The Dutch colonies, which were organized by the United East Indian Company, were first established along the Hudson River in present-day New York State starting about 1626.

Wealthy Dutch patroons set up large landed estates along the Hudson River and brought in farmers, who became renters.

It was mainly settled from about 1717 to 1775 by Presbyterian farmers from Northern England border lands, Scotland, and Ulster who were fleeing hard times and religious persecution.

[15] The mostly-agricultural Southern Colonies initially had very high death rates for new settlers because of malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases, as well as skirmishes with Native Americans.

[17] Many settlers from Europe arrived as indentured servants and had their passage paid for, in return for five to seven years of work, including free room and board, clothing, and training, but without cash wages.

By the early 18th century, the arrival of Africans forced to become slaves became a significant component of the immigrant population in the Southern colonies.

Nearly all were settled and financed by privately organized British settlers or families using free enterprise without any significant royal or parliamentary government support.

The Irish Catholics were primarily unskilled workers who built a majority of the canals and railroads and settled in urban areas.

Many Irish went to the emerging textile mill towns of the Northeast, but others became longshoremen in the growing Atlantic and Gulf port cities.

They included about 207,000 Irish, who started to emigrate in large numbers after Britain's easing of travel restrictions, and about 152,000 Germans, 76,000 British, and 46,000 French, the next-largest immigrant groups of the decade.

In 1849, the California Gold Rush attracted 100,000 would-be miners from the Eastern United States, Latin America, China, Australia, and Europe.

Nativism was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to American values and controlled by the Pope in Rome.

There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class and Protestant membership was fragmented over the issue of slavery and had most often joined the Republican Party by the time of the 1860 presidential election.

[citation needed] Congress passed a literacy requirement in 1917 to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from entering the country.

Nativists feared the new arrivals lacked the political, social, and occupational skills needed to successfully assimilate into American culture.

This raised the issue of whether the U.S. was still a "melting pot", or if it had just become a "dumping ground", and many old-stock Americans worried about negative effects on the economy, politics, and culture.

[68] Combined, both conflicts had over a million deaths and led hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to flee to the United States in order to pursue better economic conditions and stability.

The law allowed foreign-born children of American mothers and alien fathers who had entered the U.S. before the age of 18 and had lived in the country for five years to apply for U.S. citizenship for the first time.

In 1946, the Luce–Celler Act extended the right to become naturalized citizens to those from the newly-independent nation of the Philippines and to Asian Indians, the immigration quota being set at 100 people per year per country.

Initially, illegal immigrants were repatriated through Presidio because the Mexican city that was across the border, Ojinaga, had rail connections to the interior of Mexico by which workers could be quickly moved on to Durango.

The forces used by the government were relatively small, perhaps no more than 700 men, but were augmented by border patrol officials, who hoped to scare illegal workers into fleeing back to Mexico.

This all changed with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a by-product of the civil rights movement and one of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.

The 1965 Act replaced the quotas with preferential categories based on family relationships and job skills by giving particular preference to potential immigrants with relatives in the country and with occupations deemed critical by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The act sought to prevent illegal immigration by expanding the number of Border Patrol agents and allowing the Attorney General to obtain resources from other federal agencies.

IIRIRA addressed unlawful migration already in the U.S. by enhanced tracking systems that included detecting employment eligibility and visa stay violations as well as creating counterfeit-resistant forms of identification.

[91] The act also established the three- and ten-year re-entry bars for immigrants who accumulated unlawful presence in the U.S. and become inadmissible upon leaving the country.