This fairytale of a cosmopolitan-cultural-melting-pot that is the envy of the international community certainly has its charms. And there is an element of truth to it. But it’s a story with many missing chapters. Just look back at the five waves of immigration in American history and you’ll agree it hasn’t all been about peace and harmony.
The first U.S. immigrants were known as the Clovis people and arrived 13,000 years ago from Asia. Their population numbers were small to begin with. But by the time the first white explorers arrived in 1492, the Native American population, in what is now the United States, had ballooned to somewhere between two and six million (numbers still contested among many scholars).
By 1910 that number had dwindled to 266,000. These statistics, however, are more accurate because they are the result of a national census. This drastic population decline was mainly caused by the introduction of European diseases. And war played a significant role as well.
The second wave, in the 17th and 18th century, consisted of a million Europeans, mostly British, in search of more land and better opportunities. With these white settlers came another half a million Africans, who were kidnapped to work as slaves in the original 13 American colonies.
After the American Revolution, and following a law by Congress in 1808, which restricted the importation of more African slaves, immigration slowed down considerably for another generation. It then picked up again in the 1840s and ’50s, when Germans, seeking a better life, and Irish, escaping a potato famine, both crossed the Atlantic in droves, until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
The fourth wave, from 1892-1924—in which 14 million immigrants journeyed westward—was unprecedented. A drastic increase in American manufacturing at this time was one major attraction for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe seeking employment.