I
thank my hosts, Professor Rosella Mammoli Zorzi, Professor Anthony Marasco and Professor Pia Masiero, for this wonderful opportunity to speak with young people, who not only represent the future of Italy, but also half the future of the relationship between Italy and the United States. It is my pleasure to speak to you about coming to the United States – and about issues regarding immigration today. Perhaps, though, if I limit my remarks, we will be able to get into a real discussion on this subject, and then I also will be able to learn something. As you can imagine, it is hard for me to learn while I am speaking.
I have entitled this speech “Through the Golden Door” in recognition of a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, written to help raise funds for the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty is based, and to which it is dedicated. In her 1883 poem, “The New Colossus”, Ms Lazarus glorifies immigration to the United States by giving the Statue of Liberty the following words:
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Paper Show on Immigration displayed at Cà Foscari.
This poem gave rise to something called “The American Dream”. The American Dream is the belief that, through hard work and determination, an immigrant can achieve a better life for him/herself and for his or her offspring. This belief is based on the view that the U.S. has no rigid class structure barring bright and industrious people from moving up to occupy positions of wealth and influence. We sometimes call this the “Horatio Alger story”, after a 19th century writer whose stories often described “rags to riches”, or poverty to middle class economic transformations.
And while some historians and sociologists have claimed that “The American Dream” never existed, it continues to be a major factor in immigration to the United States today. People in search of opportunity still line up to get through the “Golden Door” and into the United States.
In this address, I would like to describe the history of immigration to the United States, describe the United States today, and look at the opportunities and challenges we see stemming from immigration. Then we can find out what all this means to you.
Now I know that the image of a typical American is a person whose ancestors arrived in the U.S. in the 1600s from Europe. Certainly, many of the first colonists to our original 13 colonies came to the U.S. under those circumstances, and to this day, the descendants of our Plymouth Pilgrims, Pennsylvania Quakers, New York Knickerbockers and Virginia cavaliers dominate the way we think about Americans. But the story of immigration to the U.S. is much richer than this.
Consul for Public Affairs David Bustamante during his speech, “Through the
Golden Door”.
A Nation of Immigrants
Everyone migrated to what is known as the United States today. Somewhere between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago, the people we call Native Americans crossed the Bering Land Bridge and began the human population of the Americas. Native Americans, including the Missouri Valley Mound Builders, had created great civilizations by the time of first contact with Europeans.
By the time English colonists founded Jamestown, in Virginia in 1607, and the Pilgrims stumbled ashore at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620, the Spanish had already founded two cities in what subsequently became the United States: St. Augustine, Florida (1565), and Santa Fe, New Mexico (1598).
The thirteen colonies that got together to form the United States were not all British – New York used to be known as Nieuw Amsterdam, and was established by the Dutch. The French established colonies in Louisiana and in Canada, and French trappers plied the Ohio River Valley. So not all European inhabitants of the United States immigrated to it – for some, the United States grew to embrace them.
It must also be underscored that the U.S. was multicultural from the start, and benefited from that multiculturalism from the start. The Pilgrims who were taught native secrets for planting corn, and invited their native friends to the first Thanksgiving in 1621, were saved from starvation, as were the Jamestown settlers. The Spanish, isolated in their small Florida settlements, absorbed many native customs and ways, even following the native custom of cutting “coquina”, or seashell stone, to make the great fortress of San Marcos in St. Augustine.
In fact, by the end of our colonial experience, in 1790, a census showed that, out of a population of just fewer than 4 million Americans, only about 80% were British. The others were Africans – free and slave (750,000), German (270,000), Dutch (100,000), French (15,000), Jews (2000) and Swedes (2000).
Not everyone who came to the United States came of his own free will, or could benefit from the fruits of his/her labor. British indentured servants learned a trade, working for room and board for periods of up to seven years before being freed to pursue their professions.
In the late 1600s, slaves from Africa began arriving in those colonies where large-scale agriculture could be profitable. Crops like cotton, indigo, and tobacco, raised in the hot and humid southeast, were perfectly suited to low skilled, unpaid labor, and made the south the agricultural engine of the British North American colonies. Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, and then outlawed all slavery in the British Empire in 1833. The U.S. banned the importation of slaves into the U.S. in 1808, after 300,000 slaves had already arrived. From that point on, and until slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War, Virginia became a net exporter of slaves to the burgeoning slave economies of the Deep South: Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Fulbright Educational Advisor Jeannette Law (center right) gave a lecture
on Fulbright and other U.S. educational opportunities to an audience
of about 100, including graduate and undergraduate students,
administrators, and professors. She also handed out information
on exchange programs in the United States.
The Golden Age of Immigration: 1850-1950
The failed liberal revolutions of 1848, the Irish potato famine, and the Scottish Highland Clearances increased the pace of immigration to the United States. There were also reasons why immigrants decided to come to the United States. By the late 1860’s, industrialization had begun in the East, offering a huge number of jobs at reasonably attractive wages. Average living standards in the U.S. exceeded those of Europe. These reasons why immigrants left their home countries, and why they chose to come to America, produced the Golden Age of U.S. Immigration.
The new immigrants who arrived in east coast ports like New York during this period produced both a quickened flow of immigrants from traditional sources, and major influxes from new sources. The arrival of Irish Catholics, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, including Jewish immigrants and others, began giving American cities the name of “Melting Pots”.
Although Ulster Scots were, as Protestants, easy to absorb, the average Irish immigrant was Catholic, and only Maryland had been set up as a Catholic colony. The arrival of Irish Catholics in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore created a wave of intolerance directed against immigrants in the 1830s and 40’s that was called “nativism”. Despite this first outbreak of gang violence in the U.S., Irish Catholics began by settling in squalid urban settings, and ended up dominating those same cities via control of the police and of politics.
The unrest fueled by the process of creating nation states out of the former German and Italian principalities also resulted in significant immigration of Germans and Italians into the United States. This process accelerated from 1910-1920, when over 2 million of the 5.3 million Italians who came to American between 1820 and 1980 arrived. Many of the Italian Americans found homes and an uneasy shared existence alongside their Irish Catholic brethren in large eastern U.S. cities.
Large numbers of Germans also arrived between 1850 and 1930 – about 5 million in total. They quickly decided that East Coast cities were too large and chaotic for them, and began moving away from the sea coast to farms and smaller towns where they made their mark. Significant communities in Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Minnesota spoke German and taught it to their children until two world wars broke that tradition.
Almost a million French speaking Quebec Canadians immigrated to the U.S. between 1840 and 1930, mostly settling in the northeastern U.S.
20% of the population of Norway and Sweden – 1.5 million people – came to the U.S. in the same time frame.
Between 1880 and 1924, around 2 million Jews came to the U.S.
On the west coast, California, a state since 1850, was experiencing a different sort of immigration. The arrival of New England sea captains in the 1820s first shook the small Hispanic communities and ranches of California, only recently independent from Spain and newly part of Mexico. The encroachment of Russian settlers from 1810 on - as close as Fort Ross in Northern California - resulted in the establishment of the northern missions and a wary watchfulness. But once the U.S. captured California in 1848, and in 1867 bought the rights to Russian holdings in Alaska and the Pacific Coast, that threat abated.
An extraordinary event – the California Gold Rush – brought the West’s first major wave of immigration. When gold was discovered by one of Johann Sutter’s work crews in the American River, east of Sacramento, in January 1848, an influx of half a million “49ers” began. They came from as far down the Americas as Chile, from Europe and the East Coast of the U.S. (Sutter himself was Swiss). But the newest element in immigration was the arrival of Chinese miners through the port of San Francisco. Starting on a large scale in 1850, Chinese immigration was only hastened by the need to build a transcontinental railroad, a feat accomplished in 1869 with the invaluable assistance of Chinese labor. 100,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. between 1850 and 1870, and another 125,000 became Americans in the 1870s.
The Chinese were followed between 1900 and 1930 by a very separate group of Japanese immigrants who were mainly farmers. Adopting farming techniques that were well suited to the arid west, Japanese immigrants soon formed societies to aid new settlers, some of whom branched out into fishing, and others who began to work at professions in cities. In this period, 245,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States.
Between World War I and World War II, new flows of Asian and Hispanic immigrants began arriving to take advantage of economic opportunity. Alongside Chinatowns and Little Tokyo's, the west began to see Korea towns. They would soon be followed by Philippine communities, and by the 1980’s, Vietnamese communities. The 1936-39 Spanish Civil War sent a number of refugees to the United States. The Central Valley of California began to see that farm workers did not return to Mexico at the end of the picking season, but rather established communities in small western towns. Those Mexican immigrants were followed into the United States by dissident Cubans, as well as by émigrés from further south in Mexico, from Central America and from the Caribbean.
The African American populations of the south had begun to disperse into the newer states after the Civil War, and after World War II, following higher paying industrial jobs, began to populate the large cities of the west and Midwest.
Paper Show on Immigration displayed at Cà Foscari.
Who We Are Today
Today, the United States is a nation of roughly 300 million inhabitants. Our last census, which took place in 2000, showed that, while roughly 80% of Americans claim European ancestry, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a reflection of the rest of the world; a sort of United Nations. Thirty-one ethnic groups have contributed over 1 million Americans to our “Melting Pot”.
Hispanics have now surpassed African Americans to become the largest ethnic minority in the U.S. – 13.7 percent of all Americans. 42.7 million Hispanics from a wide variety of backgrounds, and living in a surprisingly diverse number of states, are resident in the U.S. Almost two-thirds of us have conserved the use of Spanish in our homes. And that number does not count the 3.9 million residents of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, almost all claiming Hispanic origins. If you include the Puerto Rican population as Hispanic Americans, we are the second most populous Hispanic country in the world, after Mexico.
The African-American population has not grown as fast as the Hispanic populations, but they have also continued to increase their presence in the U.S. African Americans are now 13 % of all Americans. They have seen their average earnings increase along with the increase in their education levels. While poorer, ghetto-based urban African-Americans are most visible in films and the music industry, a great number of African-American families are now suburban and middle class.
The Asian-American community, with recent influxes of Hong Kong Chinese and representatives from non-traditional sources such as Iran after the 1979 revolution, India and Pakistan, has grown by leaps and bounds. Central Asian immigration has spiked, especially in Silicon Valley, where the high educational levels of these immigrants has made them invaluable in the high tech sector.
Russians and Eastern Europeans have, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, replenished ethnic Slavic communities in the U.S. that date back to the 19th Century, like the burgeoning Polish community in Chicago, second in the size of its Polish community only to Warsaw.
Native Americans have not only not disappeared, but a recent Newsweek magazine headline article heralded the Native American Renaissance in the U.S. The Native population is finally trending up, with 4.3 percent of Americans identifying themselves as partially or entirely American Indian or Alaska natives. Partly funded by casinos established by tribes on reservations and the arrival of Native Americans in large cities (today 66% of Native Americans live in cities), economic status and educational levels are rising. The opening in September 2004 of the National Museum of the American Indian, a Smithsonian Institution museum located on the National Mall in Washington, is a symbol of this resurgence.
Multi-Cultural America
Today, when we speak of multiculturalism, though, we do not only speak of the cultures from which we come. We discuss also the mix of cultures from which we come. We also consider religious freedom, freedom from gender discrimination, tolerance for non-traditional sexual choice, age discrimination issues and other elements.
The most interesting aspect of multiculturalism in the U.S. today is the tendency to break down ethnic barriers and have friends, colleagues and spouses who are from other ethnic origins. Our 2000 national Census measured, for the first time, people who consider themselves to be of more than one ethnicity. It found that 2.4% of all Americans put themselves in that category, making this the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. Now that we study, work and play together, and as our association with the nation of our ethnic origins becomes more distant, I expect that this dynamic growth will continue.
From Thomas Jefferson’s authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the United States has long prided itself on its religious tolerance. Significant efforts have been made since the founding of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island in 1762 to make the United States a nation that separates religion from government, but that encourages the practice of religion. Our efforts are based upon the belief that Americans should be free to worship as they please, either alone or in community with others, and to change or manifest their religion as they please.
As an example, Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. In April 2001, there were 1209 mosques in the U.S. and roughly 2 million practicing Muslims. The increase in the number of Mosques in the U.S. from 1994 to 2001 was 25 percent. Thirty percent of U.S. Muslims are converts to Islam. Roughly 30% of U.S. Muslims are African-American, 33% are of South Asian origins and 25% are of Arab descent.
The U.S. is also a pioneer in the fight against gender discrimination. Since women flocked to work in our World War II industrial effort, women have been a constant presence in the U.S. job market. Recent efforts to eradicate glass ceilings for female managers and to assure pay parity have borne great fruit. Our Secretary of State, today, an African American female, replaced an African American male, who replaced a woman who was the child of immigrants.
The United States was an early supporter of gay rights. Some U.S. states and municipalities have taken steps to recognize gay marriage, while others have sought a legal framework in which gay unions are legally recognized. Our Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination on a number of bases, including sexual choice. President Clinton ended discrimination in hiring and retention of gays in the U.S. military and Foreign Service.
The fastest growing population in the U.S. is aged fifty and above. These older Americans, probably the ones who did not work for the U.S. government, control half of the nation’s disposable income, 75% of its financial assets, and 80% of its savings and loan accounts. Senior citizens, organized into special interest groups like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), have become politically active to defend their rights, seeking to be allowed to work longer, invest more, and pay fewer taxes. As life expectancy increases to 74.4 years for men and 79.8 years for women, this group will become even more affluent and politically influential.
The experiment that is the United States of America has been many things since its citizen soldiers came home from the war they fought for its independence. But the constant values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have both drawn people to the United States and assured tolerance of their presence and choices once they arrived. Sometimes, as during slavery and periods of high immigration, these policies are questioned and openly opposed. But when the U.S. awakens and observes transgressions against personal freedoms, the nation has always taken the longer view that decent treatment of minority communities is in the best interest of the community as a whole. So the Abolitionist Movement and the Civil Rights Act have taken their places alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in assuring tolerance, acceptance, and even the embracing of multiculturalism.
But be sure to stay tuned – the United States never stays in one place for long. Thanks for your time and your attention. I would be very pleased to hear your comments and questions.
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