ImmigrationMs. George

Midvale Middle School

Coming to America

Between 1880 – 1920 . . . • 23 million people

came to America

• 17 million of these people entered thought the port of New York City

Who came to America?

Poor Italian Farmers• Italian Farmers didn’t

own their own land, but farmed for land owners.

• Poor economic and farming conditions caused a lot of hunger throughout Italy.

• Many Italians came to America to escape poverty.

Who came to America?

Eastern European Jews• Laws in Eastern Europe

discriminated against Jews.

• Couldn’t own land

• Couldn’t attend school

• Shtetls – Small Jewish towns.

• Pogroms – Massacres of Jewish people living in the Shtetls.

• Many Eastern European Jews moved to America to escape death.

How did they get to America?

One Person at a Time• Many families who

wanted to come to America, couldn’t make the voyage together so one person would go at a time.

• Often the father or oldest child would come to America first, find a job, and save “passage money” to bring the rest of the family over.

How did they get to America?

An Awful Journey:• Most immigrants traveled in

steerage, below the deck of a steamship.

• The conditions were horrible:

• Little water

• No fresh air

• No toilets

• This voyage lasted 2-3 weeks.

An Italian Immigrant reported, “On the fourth day a terrible storm came. The sky grew black and the ocean came over the deck. Us poor people had to go below. We had no light and no air and everyone go sick. We were like rats trapped in a hole, holding onto the posts and onto the iron frames to keep from rolling around.”

(Hopkinson, Deborah. Shutting out the Sky, 2003, p. 9)

Arriving in America

• Ellis Island

• In 1890, Congress designated Ellis Island in New York Bay as an immigration station. By the end of 1910, six million immigrants had come through Ellis Island.

Immigration Inspection

• At Ellis Island, long lines of immigrants were . . .• Tagged according to what

language they spoke.

• Marked with chalk according to their medical problems.

• The immigration inspection was a humiliating experience for many. Newly arrived immigrants were given medical inspections and asked 32 background questions. Immigrants with contagious diseases were shipped back.

Immigration Process

• With the huge numbers of immigrants, inspectors had just 2 minutes to complete the immigration process.

• Many immigrants had their last names changed by the inspectors because the inspectors didn’t have the time or patience to struggle with the foreign spellings.

NYC – Lower East Side

• The majority of immigrants settled in big cities where factory jobs were available, like New York City.

• NYC became very crowded. Most crowded of all was the lower, eastern part of Manhattan, an area called the Lower East Side.

• Within the Lower East Side, immigrants settled within areas with people of similar ethnic backgrounds. These neighborhoods became known as Little Italy, Chinatown, Little Romania, etc.

People, People Everywhere!!

• By 1910 . . .• There were 4 out of every 5

people in NYC were immigrants or children of immigrants.

• There were 1.3 million Italians lived in NYC.

• There were 1.4 million Jews lived in NYC.

• There were more than 700 people per acre.

An Italian Immigrant reported that when he first looked around NYC, he felt overwhelmed. He said, “The cobbled streets. The traffic of wagons and carts and carriages and the clopping of horses’ hoofs. The endless, monotonous rows of tenement buildings that shut out the sky. Dank hallways. Long flights of wooden stairs and the toilet in the hall. It was as if all the warm sunlight and fresh air of my mountain home in Italy had been replaced by four walls and people on every side.”

(Hopkinson, Deborah. Shutting out the Sky, 2003, p. 18)

Tenement Housing

• Many poor immigrants rented rooms in apartment buildings called tenement houses.

• To make as much money as possible, builders and landlords tried to fit as many people as possible into their tenements.

• Ten to Twelve people would share a room, splinting the rent between them.

• They subdivided rooms, narrowed the hallways, had few facilities, and made few improvements or repairs.

Tenement Housing

What were the Tenements like?• Airless Rooms

• Garbage in the Halls

• Few Outside Windows

• Little Natural Light

• Dark Halls

• Rickety, Dangerous Stairs

• Rotting Floors

• Shared Bathroom – One bathroom for every 20 people.