APUSH IMMIGRATION DBQ

old immigrants vs new immigrants

Old: Northern European (English, Germans, Irish Catholics), assimilated easier, high skill level, often spoke English New: South/Eastern, wouldn't assimilate, close- knit community, uneducated, poor, unskilled laborers

Sacco and Vanzetti

The years 1919 to 1920 are referred to as the "Red Scare" and were characterized by a number of strikes, a generalized fear of radicals, and several bombings of public figures. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were detained for the robbery and murder that occurred at the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree, which was one of these attacks. Despite the fact that they were never charged with any violent crimes or much relation to the event, Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and outspoken anarchists, these facts giving the government at the time reasons to suspect them. In this climate of social unrest and tension in the United States, their armed robbery and murder trials took place, which fueled anti-immigrant prejudice. Prejudice toward newcomers who supported the extreme ideologies of anarchist, communism, or socialism was particularly intense.

IMMIGRANTS WOULD LEAD TO LOWER JOBS/WAGES: DOCUMENT 2 JAMES BRYCE, THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH A certain part of this recent immigration is transitory. Italians and Slovaks, for instance, after they have by thrift accumulated a sum which is large for them, return to their native villages, and carry back with them new notions and habits which set up a ferment among the simple rustics of a Calabrian or North Hungarian Valley. For the United States the practice has the double advantage of supplying a volume of cheap unskilled labour when employment is brisk and of removing it when employment becomes slack, so that the number of the unemployed, often very large when a financial crisis has brought bad times, is rapidly reduced, and there is more work for the permanently settled part of the laboring class. It is easier to go backwards and forwards, because two thirds among all the races except the Jews, are men, either unmarried youths or persons who have left their wives behind.

. • Immigrants would not pose a long-term problem for the nation because many returned to their native countries and brought American values with them. • Describes benefits to the nation of cheap immigrant labor, economically supported America • The motivation for migrating was economic opportunity; when successful, many migrants tended to return to their homeland. • Bryce, one of a number of European observers of the United States, suggests that the United States had no need to restrict immigration; restriction would cause economic harm to the nation.

Immigration Act of 1917

A United States law that forbade immigration from the Asia-Pacific region and required immigrants to pass literacy tests among other measures aimed at limiting immigration.

Johnson-Reed Act

According to the Johnson Reed Act, each year's admission of immigrants from any nation was limited to 2% of the nation's population in the US as of the 1890 Census. In order to encourage immigrants from northern and Western Europe and maintain the homogeneity of the country, it absolutely banned immigrants from Asia. Last but not least, it limited the total number of immigrants who qualified for admission to 150,000 in a given year.

IMMIGRANTS WOULD LEAD TO LOWER JOBS/WAGES: DOCUMENT 4 BOOKER T. WASHINGTON SPEECH IN ATLANTA "To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits of the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race: "Cast down your bucket where you are." Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded [sic] your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South... As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past...we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach."

Booker T Washington noticed the new competition Black people had to face in the workplace Their jobs as barbers, painters, and cooks were now threatened by a profusion of eastern european immigrants in America Dr. Washington's viewpoint that people ought to take advantage of every circumstance they are in. He believed that African Americans had more economic opportunity in the south than in the north. Booker T. Washington appealed to nativism to promote African Americans as valuable laborers who were already in the South. Washington pledged the loyalty and devotion of African Americans to white southerners

Geary Act/Renewal

Chinese citizens living in the United States were required by the Geary Act to possess a Certificate of Residence as proof of their legal entry. Chinese citizens who were already lawful permanent residents in the country had to register in order to obtain their certificates. Chinese citizens who were found living abroad without these documents faced imprisonment and expulsion. This law added ten more years to the isolation of Chinese people.' More prohibitions were imposed following the Geary Act's expiration, severely limiting Chinese immigration from 1883 to 1887.

THE SCOTT ACT

Chinese laborers who had lived in the United States as citizens were not allowed to return under the Scott Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in 1882, was expanded by this bill. It left an estimated 20,000-30,000 Chinese living outside the US at the time stranded and unable to return to America. The Scott Act was affirmed by the Supreme Court. However, the Chinese government refused to accept its legality.

CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT

Deemed those of Chinese nationality unfit for American citizenship Looked down upon the Chinese for their alleged economic and moral corruption of the United States This law imposed a complete 10-year prohibition on Chinese laborers entering the country. For the first time, federal law prohibited the entry of an ethnic working group with the justification that doing so would threaten the peace in the country The Chinese Exclusion Act compelled the few non-laborers who sought entry into the United States (such as instructors, students, servants, and merchants) to get certification from the Chinese government confirming their eligibility for immigration, but banned them for the most part.

thesis

Due to the nativist views most Americans had been indoctrinated with, many concerned with the inferiority of immigrants and the threats they posed to American morals and society, the government responded to the alleged 'immigrant crisis' with a series of racist and xenophobic laws.

Haymarket Affair

Haymarket Affair After someone threw a bomb at police, a labor protest rally near Chicago's Haymarket Square descended into mayhem. The majority of attendees were German anarchists who rallied for shorter workweeks and the destruction of the American labor system. The Haymarket Affair heightened national anti-labor and anti-immigrant prejudice as well as mistrust of the global anarchist movement in Chicago and across the nation.

IMMIGRANTS WOULD LEAD TO LOWER JOBS/WAGES: DOCUMENT 3 NATIONAL PEOPLE'S PARTY PLATFORM, 1892, EXPRESSION OF SENTIMENTS RESOLVED, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.

The Populist Party created a platform in 1892 that condemned the excesses of the Gilded Age and claimed to promote social reforms to benefit "the people", solely referring to white Americans Shows the fear Americans had of immigrants overpowering them in the workplace This document shows the nativist American belief that they were graciously opening their doors to 'inferior peoples' only to be mistreated in the workplace Praises the Americans as wage-earners, demonizes the immigrants as paupers and criminals Claims immigration is undesirable due to the aforementioned reasons and is highly against it.

The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921

The first numerical restrictions on the number of immigrants who might enter the United States were set by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. This "emergency" bill setting draconian quantitative limitations on immigration was passed by Congress in response to concerns about rising immigration following the end of World War I and the development of radicalism. Annual caps were determined as being equal to 3% of the total number of foreign-born citizens from each nation that were counted in the 1910 census.

context

Throughout much of American history, immigration has played a significant role in both population growth and cultural development in the country. Immigration is a dynamic phenomenon, the many facets of it such as financial & employment opportunities for non-immigrants, settlement patterns, criminality, and even voting trends all causing some form of controversy in the country. The United States had numerous waves of immigration from places mostly in Europe and Asia between the years 1880 and 1925. At the time there was a lot of conflict during this time regarding growing xenophobic sentiment and how the government dealt with immigrants. In America, prejudice against immigrants was mostly brought on by nativist ideals. Among these was the racial hierarchy, deeming whites as the superior race and proceeding to rank the 'lesser' races of color. Those who supported anti-immigrant views frequently asserted that America was for white people only, as they were the ones who founded it. Additionally, the growing number of immigrants in the country caused some Americans to worry about problems like job security and integration of 'harmful foreign ideals' into society. With these fears instilled into American minds, an anti-immigrant era began, with both the locals wanting them out and the government taking measures to keep it that way.

IMMIGRANTS WOULD NOT ASSIMILATE DOCUMENT 6 MADISON GRANT, PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes, as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races are not doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there displayed the unanimity of heart, mind and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe.

• Madison Grant claims Anglo-Saxon superiority • Continued unchecked immigration threatened American society and morality. • Grant, an exponent of scientific racism, was a director of the American Eugenics Society and vice president of the Immigration Restriction League. • This work, originally published in 1916, was one of the most inflammatory attacks on the "new" immigrants. Instead of mixing in with the Americans, the immigrants often resided in ethnic clusters, associating only with people of their same ethnicities. This encouraged more people to move to America. Due to nativist beliefs such as social darwinism and racial hierarchy, white Americans began to blame the new immigrants for rising issues such as corruption, crime, and poverty.

ASIAN EXCLUSION DOCUMENT 5 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER GENERAL OF IMMIGRATION In order that the best results might follow from an enforcement of the regulations, an understanding was reached with Japan that the existing policy of discouraging emigration of its subjects of the laboring classes to continental United States should continue, and should, by cooperation with the governments, be made as effective as possible.

• The Japanese government cooperated with the United States in restricting migration of laborers. • "Gentlemen's Agreement." • This was issued following the San Francisco school segregation of Japanese students. • Creation of the Commissioner General of Immigration marked a major step in federalizing immigration policies; the federal government taking more direct action to limit immigration. • Change in policy from dictating to countries (e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act) to cooperating with other governments.