Immigration, Urbanization, and Nativism Study Pack

• •The "Old" Immigration: Northern and Western European Origins (pre-1880)
• •Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Britain dominated arrivals before roughly 1880.
• •Many were Protestant, spoke languages with some cultural overlap with Anglo-American norms, and settled in farming communities as well as cities.
• •The Irish Catholic influx, particularly after the Great Famine of the 1840s, was an early exception that already provoked anti-Catholic hostility.
• •The "New" Immigration: Southern and Eastern European Arrivals (1880–1924)
• •After 1880, the majority of immigrants came from Italy, Poland, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, and the Balkans.
• •Large proportions were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish, making them culturally and religiously distinct from the Protestant Anglo-American majority.
• •Many arrived as unskilled laborers seeking industrial work, intending at first to earn money and return home—a pattern sometimes called "sojourner" migration—though large numbers ultimately stayed.
• •By 1907, approximately 1.3 million immigrants entered the United States in a single year, the peak of the new immigration era.

Asian Immigration and the Pacific Coast

• •Chinese laborers came to California during the Gold Rush and subsequently provided essential labor for transcontinental railroad construction.
• •Japanese immigrants arrived in significant numbers in the 1880s–1900s, concentrated in California agriculture.
• •Both groups faced legal exclusion and racial violence that set precedents for later restrictionist policy.

Engines of Urban Growth

• •Factory jobs in steel, meatpacking, garment manufacturing, and mining concentrated in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and Cleveland, pulling workers from across the globe.
• •Between 1860 and 1900, the U.S. urban population grew from about 6 million to over 30 million people.
• •New transportation technologies—electric streetcars and elevated railroads—allowed cities to expand outward while simultaneously intensifying density in central neighborhoods.

Ethnic Enclaves and Neighborhood Formation

• •Immigrant groups clustered in distinct urban neighborhoods—Italian, Jewish, Polish, Chinese—where familiar languages, foods, religious institutions, and mutual aid societies created functional communities.
• •These enclaves offered social support but also reinforced separation from mainstream American economic and civic life.
• •Institutions like the immigrant press (newspapers published in Italian, Yiddish, Polish) allowed communities to maintain cultural identity while negotiating American conditions.

Tenement Housing and Urban Overcrowding

• •Working-class immigrants typically lived in tenements: multi-story apartment buildings subdivided into small, dark, poorly ventilated units housing multiple families.
• •New York's Lower East Side became one of the most densely populated places on earth by the 1890s, with thousands of people per city block.
• •Jacob Riis's 1890 photojournalism book How the Other Half Lives used photographs and statistics to document tenement conditions, helping to push housing reform onto the public agenda.