Immigration In America Essay, Research Paper

Since the Dutch first colonized what is now New York, this seaport city has welcomed millions of people to America’s shores. They have come from all four corners of the world: from England to Ethiopia, Italy to Indonesia and Turkey to Thailand. Between 1855 (the year New York’s official immigration center at Castle Garden opened) to 1880, the largest numbers of immigrants to theUnited States were from Ireland and Germany. Between 1880 and 1919 more than 23 million people emigrated to the United States; of these 17 million entered through New York City. The two largest groups during this period were Russian Jews and Italians. In 1924 Congress passed the National Origins Act, restricting the flow of immigrants based on their place of origin. Between the Depression in the 1930s and World War II in the early 1940s, immigration declined sharply. Post-war immigration to New York was dominated by newcomers from Puerto Rico and Latin America. Since 1965, the year of the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act,which ended discrimination based on national origin, immigrants from nearly all parts of South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East moved to the United States. Immigrants have come to the United States as political and religious exiles, the impoverished seeking opportunity, the adventuresome in search of a challenge, the staid looking for change, and for scores of other reasons. Some have come with fine-tuned skills, while others have learned trades and professions in America, often shedding traditional agrarian skills for those required of urban life. Over the years, the faces of immigrants have changed, but the desire to create a new life in America-particularly in New York City-remains unchanged, and this enthusiasm continues to be an asset to the communities thatthese new American’s call home. The images assembled here portray immigrants who came to and lived in New York during the operation of Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Between 1880 and 1924, the great waves of immigration to and through New York inspired many photographers and illustrators to depict the arrival of these newcomers and to document their new lives in the metropolis. Drawn from theunparalleled collections of the Museum of the City of New York, these images present a broad overview of how immigrants arrived and started to settle in New York City between 1855 and 1955. Crosswalks Television’s documentary, Immigrants in America on America, presents a more contemporary look at immigration, and Brian G. Andersson’s “Names and Numbers”presentation illuminates the history of immigration to New York with statistical data and maps, personal items, and some names of famous-and not so famous-New Yorkers. To accommodate the growing number of immigrants to the United States who used New York as their first port of call, an official immigration center was established at Castle Garden in 1855. Situated on land-fill at the tip of the Battery, the former fortification, concert hall, and entertainment center housed the processing of immigrants until 1890. In 1860, 105,123 immigrants disembarked

there, of whom 47,330 were Irish, 37, 899 were German and 11,361 were English. Ellis Island, in Upper New York Bay, opened as a federal immigration center on January 1, 1892. From that year until 1924, the island served as the point of entry for 16 million immigrants. In order to accommodate the influx of immigrants, the Island was enlarged with landfill and new buildings were added. The large registration room was the heart of the processing center. In 1924,with the passage of new laws curtailing immigration, Ellis Island’s activity began to wane. The island was subsequently used primarily to detain deportees. In 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service moved its offices to Manhattan and Ellis Island was declared surplus property. The languished facility fell into disrepair. However, after a successful campaign to restore the site, Ellis Island was reopened to the public in 1990 as a museum of American immigration. Most recently, Ellis Island has been the subject of a state territory dispute between New York and New Jersey. Born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1849, Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. For a time, he became one of the thousands of poor immigrants who sought refuge in police-station lodging houses, the shelters of last resort in late-nineteenth-century New York. By 1887, Riis had found steady employment as a police reporter for local newspapers. In that same year, he began to experiment with flash photography, documenting the horrors of slum life-both on his own and with the assistance of other amateur and professional photographers-and using his visual evidence to crusade on behalf of the working poor. For ten years, Riis wrote, lectured on and photographed the squalid conditions of tenement life to which immigrants were often subjected. Riis photographed the horrors of the slums specifically to shift prevailing public opinion from passive acceptance to a realization that such living conditions must be improved. Through his lectures and his publications, such as How the Other Half Lives, Riis’ reputation as a reformer grew nationally. He was a major influence in launching tenement housing reform, improving sanitary conditions, creating public parks and playgrounds and documenting the needs for more schools. All of his efforts to document, publicize, and combat these conditions helped to create a better living situation for the continual influx of newimmigrants to New York. On October 28, 1886, a cold and misty day, the Statue of Liberty was unveiled on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor and dedicated amid great public celebration. New York City declared a general holiday, and Brooklyn closed its schools. As crowds cheered, horns blared, ships’ bells rang out, and fireworks filled the air, President Grover Cleveland formally accepted the gift from the people of France to the people of the United States. More than a century later, the copper-clad statue of a crowned woman remains the best-known symbol of freedom in the world.

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