The 19th Century was fairly steady state where immigration was concerned in the years from 1800 to 1890. The exception was, first, the potato blight in Ireland, 1845. A flotilla of 5000 boats brought tens of thousands of Irish to America. (When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis – HISTORY) Those Irish congregated in two cities, New York and Boston. Boston’s blue bloods took exception to their influx as they brought their Roman Catholic religion with them to a place were Calvanist beliefs prevailed. The Irish in turn set up their own school system which was attached to their churches. A few decades later, the Boston Brahmins started sending their children to these Catholic schools as their proved far superior to the public school system in Boston at that time. Still, it was commonplace to see a sign in a shop window, “Irish Need Not Apply.”

The Chinese immigration to America started in 1848 with the discovery of gold in California. By 1850 25,000 Chinese had emigrated. In 1875, the Page Act excluded the emigration of Chinese nationals as laborers. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which suspended all Chinese emigration for 10 years. (Chinese Exclusion Act – 1882, Definition & Purpose – HISTORY) Then in 1892, the Geary Act extended Chinese exclusion for another 10 years. Then in 1902, Chinese immigration was permanently banned. These acts were purely racially motivated.

In 1880 there was a second mass exodus from Ireland the result of wide spread famine among the poor farmers. Still, immigration until the 1890s was almost exclusively northern European. The Swedes started settling Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Germans tended towards Pennsylvania but a significant number settled in other Northeastern States. Names of cities and towns reflect this immigration, cities like Steubenville NY among others.

Starting around 1890 there was termoil and famine in Eastern and Southern Europe which brought those taking flight from Russian service impressment of the Polish, Armenians and Syrians fleeing the bloodbath inflicted upon them by the Ottoman Empire, Italians fleeing extreme poverty in the southern portion of Italy. By 1890 approximately 15,000 Greeks had come to America.

The late 19th century arrivals frequently came being lured by posters saying they can get rich in American mills. Federal law prohibited such advertisements from being put up but the industrialists felt, correctly, that the politicians of the cities and states would bow to their wishes. Even a Congressional probe into such acts said such actions were not happening.

When America switched from a mainly agrarian economy in the 1820s to an industrial economy as the result of the cotton gin and the importation of the water powered loom, mills cities throughout the northeast, Pennsyvania and New Jersery lured farm girls to their mills. No where was this more evident than the mills of Lowell MA where relatively good wages and good housing had farmers pushing their daughters from New Hampshire to the Lowell mills. The reason was a simple and pragmatic one: New England farms were always difficult entities from which they made a living. The farmer relied upon male offspring to assist in the farming while the girls were seen as surplus and a drain on the household. By moving the girls to Lowell, the farmers gained twice: first, the household budget no longer included the girls and secondly, the girls sent money back home.

The Lowell and Lawrence MA mills were textile for the most part. In the early 19th century the farm girls were plentiful enough to satisfy mill needs. But as the looms got larger and faster, and the entire process of textile fabrication grew more sophisticated, the mills expanded quickly and surpassed the labor available to them from the local economy. This started about 1885. That there was abundant work available in America sounded like a really good deal to the poverty stricken Europeans of all nationalities. The Germans supplied what was referred to as “skilled labor.” They took the positions of mechanics in these mills. The job of tending to looms, cleaning wool and cotton fell to the “unskilled labor” market. And it is that market which drew droves of Europeans who were battling poverty, religious oppression, and ethnic hostilities. By 1900, immigrants were counted in the millions per year. These immigrants filled mill positions from Maryland northward and from Massachusetts westward to Chicago.

There were also the coal miners of Pennsyvania, West Virginia and Colorado who came from this immigrant stock. They became some of the first to attempt to unionize and strike. There were many scenes of violence which played out around these mines when the miners struck. The miners’ strife continued through most of the 20th century.

America’s immigrants soon lived in America’s slums as was particularly visible in Massachusetts cities, New York’s lower east side, and Chicago. In her book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams describes her outreach work in the Chicago slums to assist single mothers who had to work in the stockyards and mills of Chicago together with the task of parenthood. American novelists such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. These authors took on the industrialists and their poor treatment of their workers. Theodore Dreiser wrote the fictional novel Sister Carrie which cronicled the life of a middle class young woman who becomes a nurse and finds herself starting a “settlement house” in New York’s lower east side. This was, of course, a thinly veiled look at the life of Margaret Sanger.

America seems to always have had problems with immigrants. Each ethnic group found itself being preyed upon by the older immigrants.