The Earp Family in America : Descendants of Our Immigrant Ancestor, Thomas Earp, Jr.

March 05, 2022 Post a Comment

The U.s.a. experienced major waves of clearing during the colonial era, the outset role of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early on 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America confronting their will. The kickoff meaning federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the state's first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota arrangement that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country'south immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.

Lookout man: America: Promised Country on HISTORY Vault

Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the offset Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would go the United States. In 1607, the English language founded their kickoff permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Some of America's commencement settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known every bit the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at nowadays-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, twenty,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economical opportunities. All the same, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so past becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English language convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Past 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United states every bit of 1808, but the practice connected. The U.S. Ceremonious War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 meg enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Some other major wave of clearing occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Republic of ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, well-nigh half of America'due south immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their betoken of arrival in cities along the East Declension. Between 1820 and 1930, some four.v million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United states received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities every bit Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed High german ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early on 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment amongst certain factions of America's native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were frequently seen as unwanted contest for jobs, while many Catholics–especially the Irish gaelic–experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (as well called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, old U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a low in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Isle and Federal Clearing Regulation

1 of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting clearing was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new constabulary, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left clearing policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United states through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 1000000 immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade lone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than iv million had entered the U.s.. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution likewise arrived in large numbers; over ii million entered the U.s.a. between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Inside a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over sixteen to pass a literacy test, and in the early on 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 pct of the total number of people of each nationality in America every bit of the 1890 national demography–a organization that favored immigrants from Western Europe–and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Bracero Program

The Bracero Plan was a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United states signed in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 one thousand thousand contracts were signed — making it the largest U.S. contract labor program to date.

The program also addressed Low-era deportations and brought many Mexican Americans, who were largely targeted for deportation at the time, back to the states.

The program was criticized considering workers often faced bigotry, harsh working conditions, and had virtually no task security. Once their contracts expired, some Braceros returned home with little money because of debts incurred to the stores located in employer-operated housing camps, while others stayed in the United States illegally and sought additional piece of work.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Clearing plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and Globe War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America's foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 one thousand thousand, or from 11.vi to 6.nine per centum of the total population, co-ordinate to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that isle nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Clearing and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.