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Immigration and the Changing American City

The New Immigrants


Some 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's
dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs,
Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it
seems to incarnate their own uplifting."
The immigrants who would catch a glimpse of the statue would mainly come from eastern
and southern Europe.
In 1900, 14 percent of the American population was foreign born, compared to 8 percent a
century later. Passports were unnecessary and the cost of crossing the Atlantic was just $10
in steerage.
European immigration to the United States greatly increased after the Civil War, reaching
5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century.
Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In
1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as
Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except
Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of
Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.
Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the "new
immigrants" came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in
religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, and Russia.

Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor


On a tablet on the pedestal of the statue of liberty is inscribed a poem. Entitled "The New
Colossus," it contains the famous words, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses yearning to breathe free."
These words were not originally attached to the statue. The poem, which was written in
1883 to help raise money for the statue's pedestal, was forgotten until it was rediscovered
in a Manhattan used-book store. The text was only placed on the pedestal in 1903, and it
transformed the statue's meaning.
Its author, Emma Lazarus, was an American Jew, born in New York City in 1849. She had a
privileged upbringing, and wrote a volume of poetry that was privately printed by her father.
In 1881, a wave of anti-Semitism swept across Russia. Soldiers destroyed Jewish districts,
burned homes and synagogues. Thousands of Jews set sail for America. Lazarus was
shocked by what she saw and devoted herself to helping the refugees.
The final sum needed to complete the pedestal came from an auction of literary works by
such authors as Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Emma Lazarus was asked to contribute a
poem. She was reminded of the Colossus of Rhodes, a huge bronze statue of the sun god
Helios, one of the wonders of the ancient world. She called her poem "The New Colossus,"
and it was sold for $1,500. At the time, she was dying of cancer. She was just 38 years old
when she died in 1887.

Immigration and the Changing American City

The Chinese Exclusion Act


From 1882 until 1943, most Chinese immigrants were barred from entering the United
States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the nation's first law to ban immigration by race or
nationality. All Chinese people--except travelers, merchants, teachers, students, and those
born in the United States--were barred from entering the country. Federal law prohibited
Chinese residents, no matter how long they had legally worked in the United States, from
becoming naturalized citizens.
From 1850 to 1865, political and religious rebellions within China left 30 million dead and
the country's economy in a state of collapse. Meanwhile, the canning, timber, mining, and
railroad industries on the United States's West Coast needed workers. Chinese business
owners also wanted immigrants to staff their laundries, restaurants, and small factories.
Smugglers transported people from southern China to Hong Kong, where they were
transferred onto passenger steamers bound for Victoria, British Columbia. From Victoria,
many immigrants crossed into the United States in small boats at night. Others crossed by
land.
The Geary Act, passed in 1892, required Chinese aliens to carry a residence certificate with
them at all times upon penalty of deportation. Immigration officials and police officers
conducted spot checks in canneries, mines, and lodging houses and demanded that every
Chinese person show these residence certificates.
Due to intense anti-Chinese discrimination, many merchants' families remained in China
while husbands and fathers worked in the United States. Since Federal law allowed
merchants who returned to China to register two children to come to the United States, men
who were legally in the United States might sell their testimony so that an unrelated child
could be sponsored for entry. To pass official interrogations, immigrants were forced to
memorize coaching books which contained very specific pieces of information, such as how
many water buffalo there were in a particular village. So intense was the fear of being
deported that many "paper sons" kept their false names all their lives. The U.S. government
only gave amnesty to these "paper families" in the 1950s.
The Growth of the American City
In the 40 years after the Civil War, over 24 million people flocked to American cities. They
came from rural areas in the United States but also across oceans from farming areas and
industrial cities in Europe. While the United States' rural population doubled during these
years, the urban population increased more than seven-fold. In 1860, 16 cities had a
population over 50,000 and only nine had a population over 100,000. By 1900, 38 cities had
more than 100,000 inhabitants.
The modern American city was not simply a larger version of older towns. In the late 19th
century, American cities changed dramatically in physical size and spatial layout. In Boston
in 1873, the outer boundary of settlement stood just two-and-a-half miles from City Hall. In
the 1890s, after the establishment of the electric street railway, the outer border of
settlement was six miles away. By annexing surrounding lands and filling in bays, cities
grew larger, allowing for greater differentiation in the use of space.
Manufacturing and commerce crowded into city centers. Meanwhile, the development of
steam railroad lines in the 1860s, electric-powered streetcars and elevated railways in the
1880s, and electric trolleys in the 1890s allowed the wealthy and the middle class to move
along newly constructed trolley and rail lines to the country's first suburbs. At the same time

Immigration and the Changing American City

the urban poor were concentrated in newly constructed tenements, few of which had
outside windows. Less than 10 percent had indoor plumbing or running water.
Tenement Houses
The immigrant poor lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing. Many lived in
tenements, dumbbell-shaped brick apartment buildings, four to six stories in height. In
1900, two-thirds of Manhattan's residents lived in tenements.
In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment. Each apartment had a
wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub in the kitchen, which, when covered with
planks, served as a dining table. Before 1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses.
Afterward, two common toilets were installed on each floor. In the summer, children
sometimes slept on the fire escape. Tenants typically paid $10 a month rent.
In tenements, many apartments were dark and airless because interior windows faced
narrow light shafts, if there were interior windows at all. With a series of newspaper articles
and then a book, entitled How the Other Half Lives, published in 1889, Jacob Riis turned
tenement reform into a crusade.

Immigration and the Changing American City

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