Interpreting Seconday Sources- The Immigrant Experience

1. The title is "The Immigrant Experience in the Gilded Age".
2. This document is by Roger Daniels.
3. Daniels is addressing the incorporation of immigration in with the prevailing themes of the Gilded Age- industrialization, social darwinism, etc.- and how these translated into the twentieth century.
4. The influx of immigration during the Gilded Age can be characterized most noticeably in it's volume, ethnic groups, and it's influence in the later restrictions of immigrations.
5. "Between 1866 and 1900, 13,259,469 immigrants were recorded as entering the United States. On the one hand, these thirty-four years saw the entry of a larger number of persons, by far, than had come to the United States and the British North American colonies in the previous two and one-half centuries; on the other hand, nearly as many persons, 12,928,517, would come in the next fourteen years."

"By the beginning of the Gilded Age, immigrants already were concentrated heavily in certain American regions and cities. According to the 1870 census close to one-half of all immigrants lived in the Northeast, which had less than one-third of the nation's population."

"All Gilded Age immigrant groups shared certain experiences and problems. They benefited from the great industrial expansion that provided employment for most of their breadwinners, and they suffered from the contractions in the business cycle that convulsed each of the century's last three decades. Those who entered the United States during this period were the first free American immigrants to suffer from federal restriction and regulation of immigration."

"More than three-fifths of all immigarnts in the period came from western Europe, most of them from Germany, Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia."

“One of the great myths of American immigration is that most new arrivals were desperately poor... While it is true that few who came to America were rich, the vast majority were not the poorest of the poor in their own societies."

"Immigrants were less attracted to the West and South; the former had 6.6 percent of the population and only 4.5 percent of the immigrants, while the latter, with close to one-third of the population, had just 7.2 percent of the foreign born."

6. How did the growing anti-immigration sentiment of this time period influence the way that Americans perceived major events of the twentieth century? Have the nativist sentiments ever left the minds of Americans?