Immigration to america

It would be wrong to say that immigration to America has "become" a hot-button issue, since immigration to America has simply always been a hot button issue. From the days of the earliest European settlers, through the great waves of European immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the modern immigration tides from East Asia and Latin America today, immigration to America has always been a political football for demagogues looking to score cheap points with isolated, tribalistic denizens of the country's less enlightened areas.

Depending upon your point of view the history of immigration to america began in earnest with the Pilgrims and the Plymouth Colony of the early seventeenth century. This was the first permanent establishment of europeans on the east coast of the continent, though it should be noted that Vikings had established villages in both Greenland and on the northern tip of Newfoundland over seven hundred years previous.

That said, the real beginning of immigration to America started with the europeans in the eighteenth century. Records vary, but various sources say that somewhere from four hundred thousand to one million europeans - mainly of German and British descent - immigrated to America between colonial times and the year 1814. In addition to the Dutch settlements along the Hudson River and the British settlements in New England, there was also a wave of French immigration to America along the gulf coast - specifically Louisiana - and Scots-Irish immigration to America throughout Appalachia but most specifically to what is now western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. And of course there were hundreds of thousand of slaves that immigrated to America during the same time, however, since the slaves weren't crossing the Atlantic of their own accord, they are generally not counted in immigration to America statistics.

The real explosion in immigration to America happened at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, sometimes called the Napoleonic World War, which played its last act in 1815. That, combined with a relaxation of immigration laws, saw a surge or Europeans making their way to America.

The biggest post-1815 waves of immigrants came from Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. While a great many French settled in Quebec in what is now Canada, most of the other groups dispersed throughout the United States.

But numbers really picked up starting in 1845 with the Irish Potato Famine, followed by a general famine throughout Europe and a number of failed revolutions three years later. By the 1850s, nearly one million Europeans per year were immigrating to America.