Between 1880 and 1910, almost fifteen million immigrants entered the United States, a number which dwarfed immigration figures for previous periods. Unlike earlier nineteenth century immigration, which consisted primarily of immigrants from Northern Europe, the bulk of the new arrivals hailed mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. These included more than two and half million Italians and approximately two million Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as many Poles, Hungarians, Austrians, Greeks, and others.
The new immigrants’ ethnic, cultural, and religious differences from both earlier immigrants and the native-born population led to widespread assertions that they were unfit for either labor or American citizenship. A growing chorus of voices sought legislative restrictions on immigration. Often the most vocal proponents of such restrictions were labor groups (many of whose members were descended from previous generations of Irish and German immigrants), who feared competition from so-called “pauper labor.â€Â
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese immigration and made it nearly impossible for Chinese to become naturalized citizens, efforts to restrict European immigration increased. In the same year, the Immigration Act for the first time levied a “head tax†(initially fifty cents a person) intended to finance enforcement of federal immigration laws. The act also made several categories of immigrants ineligible to enter the United States, including convicts, "lunatics" (a catch-all term for those deemed mentally unfit) and those likely to become “public charges,†i.e., those who would place a financial burden on state institutions or charities. A second Immigration Act in 1891 expanded these categories to include polygamists and those sick with contagious diseases, and established a Bureau of Immigration to administer and enforce the new restrictions. In 1892, Ellis Island opened in New York Harbor, replacing Castle Garden as the main point of entry for millions of immigrants arriving on the East Coast. In accordance with the 1891 law, the federal immigration station at Ellis Island included facilities for medical inspections and a hospital.Â
While business and financial interests occasionally defended unrestricted immigration, viewing a surplus of cheap labor as essential to industry and westward expansion, calls for measures restricting the flow of the new immigrants continued to grow. Although President Grover Cleveland vetoed an 1897 law proposing a literacy test for prospective immigrants, further restrictions on immigration continued to be added. Following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, xenophobia and hysteria about political radicalism led to the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which excluded would-be immigrants on the basis of their political beliefs.Â
In 1907, immigration at Ellis Island reached its peak with 1,004,756 immigrants arriving. That same year, Congress authorized the Dillingham Commission to investigate the origins and consequences of contemporary immigration. The Commission concluded that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe posed a serious threat to American society and recommended that it be greatly curtailed in the future, proposing as the most efficacious remedy a literacy test similar to the one President Cleveland had vetoed in 1897. Ultimately, the Commission’s findings provided a rationale for the sweeping immigration laws passed in the years after World War I.
Immigrant families, by necessity, had to create a composite income based on the wages of the father and older children, income from boarders, and the earnings of women from work done at home. Louise More, in her study of wage-earning budgets in New York City in 1909, made a crucial observation about the family economy of immigrant and working-class families:
The number of families entirely dependent on the earnings of one person is small when compared with the number whose incomes include the earnings of the husband, wife, several children, some boarders. . . gifts from relatives, aid from charitable societies, insurance money in the case of death—several or all of these resources may enter into the total resources of that family in a year. Perhaps this income should more accurately be called the household income, for it represents the amount which comes into the family purse and of which the mother usually has the disbursement?
In most working-class families….the older children were required to [turn over their wages]. It was the “general custom for all boys and girls to bring their pay envelopes unopened and (the mother) had the entire disbursement of their wages, giving them 25 cents to one dollar a week spending money according to the prosperity of the family.†The unopened pay envelope was a sign of responsibility and respect for the work of the mother.
Amalia Morandi, an Italian garment worker, restated this pervasive theme: "I gave my pay envelope to my mother. . . I wouldn't dare open it up. . . I'd give it to my mother because I knew that she worked hard for us and I thought this was her compensation."
Mollie Linker articulated another aspect of this relationship: "I gave it all to my mother. It was the respect to bring and give your mother the money."
In the Old World, daughters were expected to support the work of their mothers in the home. But in America, to do this they had to leave the house and go into the factories. Yet mothers expected their daughters to respect the economic priorities of the household, and the sealed pay envelope was a new form of an old responsibility.
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Having money to spend on oneself was closely connected to breaking out of the family circle. Amalia Morandi, and Italian garment worker, was a “good girlâ€â€”she always brought her pay home and stayed close to her mother. But her sister was different:
She used to open the envelope and take a few dollars if she needed it. They (her sister and friend) would have costume balls and she would come home at 2 o’clock—that was terrible, especially for the Italian people. That was awful, when a woman, a girl at her age, which was 18 or 19, when they came home at 12 o’clock the neighbors would gossip, would say look at that girl coming home by herself. My mother would talk to her, it did no good. It went in one ear and out the other. And then one day she came home and she says to my mother, she wanted to give her board. And my mother says whatdaya mean by board—my mother knew what she meant. She says, oh I give you so much a week, and then the rest is for me. So my mother says alright, go ahead, do what you please.
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This transformation of traditional values created particular problems for women. Caught between the desires of their children and devotion (and obedience) to their husbands, called on to reinforce the patriarchal wishes of their husbands, the women found themselves in the middle of emotionally explosive family situations. In addition, traditions of patriarchy demanded that female children be subordinate and inferior, and immigrant daughters were allowed little leeway in their desire for independence, schooling, and sexual freedom. Since these demands frequently also challenged the mother’s standards of proper female behavior, she had to steer a course between the authority and discipline of her husband, the wishes of her daughters, and her own sensibilities.
THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.
The great bulk of the present immigration proceeds from Italy, Austria, and Russia, and, furthermore, from some of the most undesirable sources of population of those countries. No one would object to the better class of Italians, Austrians, and Russians coming here in large numbers; but the point is that such better element does not come, and, furthermore, that immigration from such countries as Germany and the British Isles has fallen to a very low figure.Â
The great bulk of the present immigration settles in four of the Eastern States and most of it in the large cities of those States. Notwithstanding the well-known demand for agricultural labor in the Western States, thousands of foreigners keep pouring into our cities, declining to go where they might be wanted because they are neither physically or mentally fitted to go to these undeveloped parts of our country and do as did the early settlers from northern Europe.Â
...Past immigration was good because most of it was of the right kind and went to the right place. Capital cannot, and it would not if it could, employ much of the alien material that annually passes through Ellis Island, and thereafter chooses to settle in the crowded tenement districts of New York.Â
...A strict execution of our present laws makes it possible to keep out what may be termed the worst element of Europe (paupers, diseased persons, and those likely to become public charges), and to this extent these laws are most valuable….But these laws do not reach a large body of immigrants, who, while not of this class, are yet generally undesirable, because unintelligent, of low vitality, of poor physique, able to perform only the cheapest kind of manual labor, desirous of locating almost exclusively in the cities, by their competition tending to reduce the standard of living of the American wageworker, and unfitted mentally or morally for good citizenship.