This is the first in a series of posts to tell of the history of immigration to America starting with its earliest instances and continuing to today. I am prompted to do this because of the latest round of xenophobia stoked by the Trump presidency. But Trump is only the latest in a long history of such response.

The United States undoubtedly has citizens who trace their ancestry back to every country in the world today, and, to countries which either no longer exist or have changed their identity.

We are a nation of immigrants with only a very small portion of indigenous peoples, who, according to anthropologists are actually immigrants themselves. The difference is that those immigrants came approximately 10,000 years ago over the frozen bridge between present day Russia and Alaska. But that sort of migration was a ancient form of world population which first began in Eastern Africa a million years ago, possibly longer.

The immigration policies of today in the United States have only existed since 1924 in full force as part of a quota system established by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. That act had its beginnings in 1917 when the United States tried to stem certain populations from entering the United States. But even 1917 is not the beginning. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a purely racist act by the westesrn states over fear of white supremicy and racial purity. Those Chinese immigrants first started entering the U.S. in 1848.

The American idea of who was an American came out of the large emigration of people from England in the early years of our country. As other nationalities started to enter the United States, there was a push back against them over fears of these immigrant taking jobs from established residents.

But the American view of who was actually an American was narrowly defined excluding black Americans who first arrived in 1619 in the Virginia Colony but quickly spread to all 13 of the original colonies. Later, when there were threee waves of Irish immigration, more and more the actual signage on stores of “Irish Need Not Apply” were common. What brought this sort of xenophobia was the fact that almost all Irish brought with them Roman Catholocism with them, a challenge to the anti-Papal religions of Protestantism.

But anti-Irish sentiment quickly passed into the background when beginning in the 1890s a wave of southern and eastern Europeans arrived on our shores. These non-English speaking peoples who not only brought more Catholicism with them, also brought Judeism with them. Additonally the southern Europeans brought a darker skinned people who stood out. Nowhere in the United States was this assimilation shown more prominently than in the lower east side of New York City when these peoples settled. Suddenly the English speaking majority’s ears heard Italian, Polish and Yiddish languages which these immigrants clung to. But this shows the short memories of those Americans who had forgotten the German speaking immigrants of the 1880s.

In the following chapters, I will outline how and who grew our population over the decades. But also, with the great immigration of 1890 to 1920 was the beginnings of many reform movements and unionization. Each of these was an anathema to the English speaking conservative Americans. Immigants poured through the ports of New York, Boston and Baltimore unabated until 1924. American industrialists fought that immigration and were behind the 1924 act.

This is an overview of what I will present in the following chapters. American thought today has the unfortunate lack of understanding that we are still a country heavily reliant upon new immigrants, a fact that will undoubtedly continue in the coming decades. Hopefully you will gain an appreciation of “how we got here” when I finish.