The New Immigration

Before 1880, most immigrants came from northwestern Europe: Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia. After 1880, the balance tipped toward southern and eastern Europe: Italians, Poles, Jews and other Russians, Greeks, Hungarians. Push factors drove them out, overcrowded farmland, religious persecution like the pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire, and collapsing peasant economies. Pull factors drew them in, American industrial jobs, letters from relatives, and steamship lines competing for passengers. By the 1890s steerage fares had dropped to roughly thirty dollars, cheap enough that whole villages could send workers rather than just a few pioneers, and the flow became a flood.

The crossing itself was brutal. Steerage meant the lowest deck, no portholes, bunks stacked tight, shared toilets, a week or two of seasickness and crowding. Arrival in New York meant Ellis Island: doctors watched the line for limps or coughs, chalked letters on coats to flag suspected illness, and checked eyelids for trachoma with a buttonhook. Most passed through in hours, but the inspection line was a real filter, and families could be separated if one member failed.

Once ashore, chain migration took over. A letter home naming a street, a job, a landlord who spoke Sicilian or Yiddish, pulled the next cousin or neighbor to that same block, so a single tenement might fill with people from one Italian village or one Polish parish. This clustering built the ethnic urban neighborhoods of the era, Little Italy, the Lower East Side, and it is the immediate backdrop for 6.9's nativist backlash and the push for immigration restriction.