In memory of my great-grandparents—the Boccuzzis, Valeris, Marinos, and Cerones—and for immigrants who continue to come to our country with courage and hope

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osborne, Linda Barrett, 1949–This land is our land : the history of American immigration / by Linda Barrett Osborne.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4197-1660-7 (alk. paper)
eISBN 978-1-6131-2927-2
1. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Immigrants—United States—History—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
E184.A1O83 2016
304.80973—dc23
2015017877

Text copyright © 2016 Linda Barrett Osborne
Book design by Maria T. Middleton & Sara Corbett
For illustration credits, see this page.

Published in 2016 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNINGS

Germans, Irish, and Nativists

CHAPTER 2

THE OTHER EUROPE ARRIVES

Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans

CHAPTER 3

THE OTHER SHORE

Immigrants from Asia

CHAPTER 4

SOUTH OF OUR BORDER

Latin American Immigrants

CHAPTER 5

SEEKING SAFETY AND LIBERTY

Refugees

CHAPTER 6

THIS LAND IS WHOSE LAND?

From World War II into the Twenty-First Century

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX: COMING TO—AND STAYING IN—THE UNITED STATES

SELECTED TIME LINE OF IMMIGRATION HISTORY

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

INTRODUCTION

All eight of my great-grandparents were born in Italy. They came to the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. At least two of them arrived before 1892, when Ellis Island opened to process the millions of people emigrating from Europe. My great-grandparents were immigrants to this country.

So were the English settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the Pilgrims, in 1620.

The United States is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. The ancestors of everyone who lives here, except for the Native Americans “discovered” in North America by Europeans in the early sixteenth century, came from somewhere else. (The slaves brought from Africa also came from across the Atlantic, although they came against their will. Theirs is a separate story.) Most Americans—even those who call for limits on immigration—have an image of our country as welcoming others who seek freedom and opportunity. Look at the words by poet Emma Lazarus engraved on the base holding the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of hope, of a new start, recognized around the world. People have immigrated to America, to make a better life for themselves and their families, since the first European colonists arrived in the 1500s. Some of the earliest Europeans to explore and settle in what is now the United States included the Spanish, Dutch, and French. The Spanish founded St. Augustine, in what became Florida, in 1565. This is the oldest city on the U.S. mainland where people have continually lived. The first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was not established until 1607.

“It lyes in a mild & temperate Clymate,” William Byrd II wrote in 1736 about the colony of Virginia. “The woods are full of Buffalo’s, Deer, & Wild Turkeys. . . . It is within the Government of Virginia, under the King [of England], where Liberty & Property is enjoyed, in perfection & the impartial administration of Justices hinders the Poor from every kind of Oppression from the Rich, & the Great.”

“Any man or woman are fools that would not venture and come to this plentyful Country where no man or woman ever hungered or ever will,” Margaret McCarthy, who arrived in New York in 1850, wrote to her father in Ireland.

“We came over here with nothing but our bare hands,” recalled Albertina di Grazia, who emigrated from Italy in 1913. “We were dirt poor. This country gave us a chance to work and to get something out of our work and we worked hard for our children. And now they’ve got what we worked for. We’re satisfied.”

Immigrants who settle in the United States are grateful for the opportunities the country offers them. They are often welcomed, but Americans also have a long history of setting limits on immigration or rejecting it outright. George Washington, the first president of the United States, sometimes supported immigration. But he also wrote, “I have no intention to invite immigrants, even if there are no restrictive [government] acts against it. I am opposed to it altogether.”

Washington also wrote to John Adams, who would follow him as president: “[With] respect to immigration . . . that except of useful mechanics and some particular . . . men and professions, there is no use of encouragement.”

Both of these ways of looking at immigration—openness to all or restrictions for some—are part of our heritage. In the early twenty-first century, we still debate who and how many people should be allowed into our country, and if and when they should be allowed to become citizens. Some Americans think of the United States as multicultural, made stronger by the diversity of different ethnic groups. Others think that there should be one American culture and that it is up to the immigrant to adapt to it. Still others have believed that some immigrant groups are incapable of adapting and should not be permitted to stay.

Americans whose families have lived here for sometime—whether centuries, decades, or just a few years—often discount their own immigrant heritage. They look down on newcomers from other countries. Indeed, far from inviting Lazarus’s “huddled masses,” our laws, policies, and prejudices have often made it difficult for many immigrants to enter the United States or to find themselves welcome when they are here.

This Land Is Our Land explores this country’s attitudes about immigrants, starting from when we were a group of thirteen English colonies. Until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese workers from immigrating to the United States, there were no major national restrictions on immigration—therefore, there were no illegal immigrants, or what we now call “undocumented aliens”: people from foreign (alien) countries who have no official papers to enter the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the biggest immigration issues were whether and how to limit the number of southern and eastern Europeans—and also to limit the immigration of Asians, who, in addition, were denied the right to become American citizens if they lived here.

Quota laws passed in 1921 and 1924 set limits on immigrants from Europe and Asia. Immigration from Latin America and Canada was not restricted then. As demands for labor in the southwestern United States increased in the 1920s, more Mexicans, especially, came to the United States. Some came officially; others came by simply crossing the border. The distinction between legal and illegal immigrants became important to Americans.

While the specific situations and attitudes toward some immigrant groups have changed, the general ideas expressed for and against immigration remain remarkably constant. Look at what Benjamin Franklin wrote about the large number of German immigrants to Pennsylvania in 1751, more than two hundred and fifty years ago:

Why should the [German] Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Now imagine the same words today, with “Mexican” substituted for “German.”

As they came, settled, and endured, each immigrant group went through a remarkably similar experience. They left their countries to escape poverty, war, starvation, or religious and political persecution—or for economic opportunity. As foreigners who came from different cultures and often spoke languages other than English, they faced prejudice from groups that were already here. They seemed to threaten American customs and values established as early as the 1600s. Often, they were denied jobs and housing. They did the hardest and least well paid work. Yet they saved money and made homes here. Immigrant men brought over their wives and children; immigrant children brought their siblings and parents. Families reunited. Whole communities left their country of birth and regrouped in America. The children and grandchildren of immigrants, born here, spoke English. They absorbed American attitudes and ways of living. They grew in numbers and gained political power.

They often acted toward immigrant groups that came after them with the same kind of prejudice and discrimination that their families had encountered when they first moved here.

This Land Is Our Land does not attempt to answer all the questions and solve all the problems associated with immigration. Rather, it looks at our history to provide a context for discussion. If we examine the way Americans have responded to immigrants over time—and the responses have been startlingly similar and consistent—we gain an insight into immigration issues today. Why do we sometimes invite immigration and sometimes fear it? How much does race play a part in whether we accept new immigrants? Does the legacy of our country’s origin as a group of English colonies still shape our attitudes?

This book also presents the experiences of immigrants who left their home countries to start a new life here. How did their expectations and aspirations match the realities of living in the United States? How was the experience of different groups affected by racial prejudice? How did they eventually succeed, if they did, in becoming Americans?

The title of this book is a play on the words of the 1940 song by folksinger Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land.” For Guthrie, the United States was both your land and my land—the land of everyone who lives in this country, you and me. He is nonexclusive—meaning there is no one who does not belong here.

When we read the title This Land Is Our Land, what do we think “our” means? Is it our land, the land of the people who already live here, who were once but are no longer immigrants? Or is it our land, including the people who still come here for opportunity and freedom and to make the United States their home?

THE BEGINNINGS

GERMANS, IRISH, AND NATIVISTS

The United States thinks of itself as the world’s “melting pot.” It is the country where men and women of many nationalities can become united as Americans. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, a French immigrant farmer, wrote in the late eighteenth century:

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European or the descendant of an European. . . . He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced. . . . Here 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.

“America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!” Israel Zangwill wrote in 1908 in his play The Melting Pot. “Melting pot” became a popular term to describe the United States.

On the other hand, Americans have not welcomed—or have denied entry to—many groups of immigrants. Note that for de Crevecoeur and Zangwill, the ingredients in the melting pot were all European. Many of the first European settlers looked down on other peoples. They tried to enslave American Indians, fought them, and took over their land. They enslaved Africans; and even after all slaves were freed in 1865, black people were treated harshly and unfairly under legal segregation.

Many European Americans thought that Native Americans and African Americans were inferior to them, based on unscientific ideas about race. They thought they themselves were favored by God to rule over other peoples. Race was not just about looking different; it was about feeling superior to other groups of human beings. Feeling superior allowed Europeans to justify their treatment of others. Americans divided people into acceptable and unacceptable groups, depending on their physical features and countries of origin.

But when Europeans who were not English began to immigrate to the United States, they often encountered discrimination, too. The idea of race expanded to include those who were slightly darker than the descendants of most English people. Benjamin Franklin wrote “that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black and or tawny [brown]. . . . And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy [brown] Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons [one group of Germans] only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”

Today, nobody would think of Germans and Swedes as not white. In fact, by the end of the 1800s, they were accepted as white and American. But deciding who could be American was more complicated than just skin color. It also had to do with English traditions of religion, culture, and language, and ideas about government. For many people, being American has meant being white, Protestant, and English-speaking.

Even in the early twentieth century, some American politicians, the press, and the public called for preserving the United States for English descendants, or what they called “Anglo-Saxons.” (We might call them “Caucasian,” or just “white people,” today.) “Anglo-Saxon” was the name given to the English from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. (The Saxon settlers of England were actually German immigrants who pushed the Scots and Welsh out of England.) Americans thought of themselves as Anglo-Saxons if they were born in the United States and descended from an English immigrant. By the late 1800s, the descendants of German, Irish, Welsh, Scots, French, Swiss, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Belgian immigrants, who had sometimes faced discrimination, were also considered acceptable.

These people considered themselves “native Americans” (never mind that the only native Americans were the American Indians, who were here long before the Europeans). Those who opposed immigration by any other ethnic group were called “nativists.” Nativists didn’t just believe that they were the only true Americans; they actively fought to keep other ethnic groups out of the United States.

Wherever the foreign-born population grew in numbers, nativism usually did, too. Two of the large immigrant groups following the founding of the English colonies were German and Irish. About 100,000 Germans immigrated to America between 1710 and 1775, before the United States became a country. In fact, more immigrants arrived from Germany than from England during this period. Many came as indentured servants—mostly young people who were bound by contract to work for an American for several years in return for their passage, the cost of their transportation to the United States. The life was hard, and families were sometimes separated. But this was also the eventual path to independence and even ownership of farms.

German and Irish immigrants made up two-thirds of new immigrants to the United States between 1830 and 1860. During this time, nativism was powerful in many parts of the United States, mainly on the East Coast. After 1840, Midwestern and Western states and territories actually encouraged immigration, since they had so much unpopulated land to be settled. Before the Civil War, some states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, even allowed immigrants who had started the process of citizenship, but were not yet American citizens, to vote.

The Irish came gradually until 1845, when Hannah Curtis wrote that “it is most dreadful the state the potatoes are in in Ireland . . . they are all tainted in the ground. . . . it is the opinion of every one there will be no potatoes. . . . we are greatly affraid there will be a famine this year.” Many Irish, who depended on potatoes as their main food, died when the potato crops failed. From 1847 to 1852, almost a million people emigrated from Ireland, most to keep from starving. On April 2, 1852, the New York Times reported:

On Sunday last three thousand emigrants arrived at this port. On Monday there were over two thousand. On Tuesday over five thousand arrived. On Wednesday the number was over two thousand. Thus in four days twelve thousand persons were landed for the first time upon American shores. A population greater than that of some of the largest and most flourishing villages of this State, was thus added to the City of New-York within ninety-six hours.

New York City was overwhelmed with immigrants in a very short time. So was Boston, where a city public health report described the slums where Irish immigrants lived, “huddled together like brutes, without regard to age or sex or sense of decency. Under such circumstances self-respect . . . all the high and noble virtues soon die out, and sullen indifference and despair or disorder, intemperance [drinking alcohol] and utter degradation reign supreme.”

Nativists often used words like “brutes” to describe immigrants. Many white Americans had long described African Americans that way: as animal-like and less than human. This ugly racism was both the foundation and the legacy of slavery. The habits of racial thinking made it easy for nativists to feel prejudice against newcomers. People were judged by facial features as well as clothing, language, and the perceptions nativists had about the culture and values of the country they came from. These newer groups were seen as inferior and uneducated, the bearers of disease and crime.

But the Irish could and did become successful. “I am exceedingly well pleased at coming to this land of plenty,” wrote an Irish immigrant to the London Times in 1850.

On arrival [in the United States] I purchased 120 acres of land at $5 an acre. You must bear in mind that I have purchased the land out, and it is to me and mine an “estate for ever”, without a landlord, an agent or tax-gatherer to trouble me. I would advise all my friends to quit Ireland—the country most dear to me; as long as they remain in it they will be in bondage and misery.

What you labour for [here] is sweetened by contentment and happiness; there is no failure in the potato crop, and you can grow every crop you wish. . . . You need not mind feeding pigs, but let them into the woods and they will feed themselves, until you want to make bacon of them.

One of the main objections nativists had to some German immigrants (those who were not Protestants) and nearly all Irish immigrants was that they were Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church was led by the Pope in Rome, who some nativists believed wanted to take over the United States. “It is a fact, that Popery is opposed in its very nature to Democratic Republicanism; and it is, therefore, as a political system, as well as religious, opposed to civil and religious liberty, and consequently to our form of government,” wrote Samuel F. B. Morse, in 1835. He was alarmed by the “increase of Roman Catholic cathedrals, churches, colleges, convents . . . in every part of the country; in the sudden increase of Catholic emigration [from Europe]; in the increased clannishness of the Roman Catholics, and the boldness with which their leaders are experimenting on the character of the American people.” Morse was a prominent American, one of the inventors of the telegraph. Lyman Beecher, a respected Protestant minister and the father of the anti-slavery author Harriet Beecher Stowe, also expressed these views in the 1830s.

Germans (many settled on farms in the Midwest) also drew criticism for being un-American because they wanted to keep speaking German, send their children to German-language schools, and develop German-language newspapers—in other words, to keep their own culture. But most Germans began to adopt American ways as they settled in the United States and prospered economically.