Immigration and the Making of American Power

Between 1880 and 1920, approximately twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States. They came from Southern and Eastern Europe — Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, the Austro-Hungarian Empire — as well as from China, Japan, and Mexico. They came for jobs, for land, for escape from poverty and persecution. They found a country that desperately needed their labour and was profoundly ambivalent about their presence.

Ellis Island processed about twelve million of these arrivals between its opening in 1892 and its closure in 1954. The experience of passing through Ellis Island — the medical inspections, the name recordings often mangled by overwhelmed inspectors, the anxiety of the legal processing — became a shared mythology of American immigration, a rite of passage for a particular kind of American family story.

The economics of mass immigration and American industrial growth were inseparable. The factories, mines, railroads, and construction projects of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era needed enormous amounts of labour, and the native-born population could not supply it. Immigrants filled that gap and typically accepted wages and conditions that established workers found unacceptable. This created enormous tension — strikes, labour violence, ethnic hostility — but it also drove productivity and growth.

The process by which immigrants became American is still debated. The melting pot metaphor, popularized by Israel Zangwill's 1908 play of the same name, described a process of cultural fusion in which differences were dissolved into a common American identity. The reality was messier, slower, and more contested. Ethnic enclaves — Little Italy, Chinatown, the Jewish Lower East Side — maintained distinct cultures for generations. Assimilation happened, but gradually and unevenly.

Politically, immigrant communities transformed American cities. Urban political machines like Tammany Hall in New York built their power bases on immigrant votes, delivering services — jobs, legal help, social support — in exchange for political loyalty. The machine was corrupt and effective, and for millions of immigrants it was the first institution of American public life that treated them as people whose interests mattered.

The backlash came in the form of immigration restriction. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of nationality and race. The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed a quota system that drastically reduced Southern and Eastern European immigration and effectively barred Asian immigration entirely. The door that had been open for most of American history swung partly shut.

But the impact of the great wave of immigration was already baked into the country. The America of the twentieth century — its industrial workforce, its urban culture, its popular music and food and language — was substantially shaped by people who had arrived speaking no English, with little money, into a country that both needed them and resented them. That paradox is among the most persistently American of all American stories.