6.8 Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age

The 'old versus new' line was drawn partly by nativists who wanted to argue the newcomers were less able to assimilate. Treat it as a description of real changes in where immigrants came from, not as proof they were different in quality.

Push factors drove people out: poverty and land shortages in southern Italy, violent attacks (pogroms) on Jews in the Russian Empire after 1881, and population growth across Europe. Pull factors drew them here: industrial jobs, cheaper and faster steamship travel, and letters from relatives already in America.

Many were young men who planned to earn money and go home. Historians call these temporary migrants 'birds of passage', and a large share of Italian and Greek immigrants did return.

On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants had arrived since the 1849 Gold Rush and worked on railroads, in mines and in agriculture, until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 cut off most new arrivals (6.9). Mexican immigrants worked in mines, railroads and farms in the Southwest. Ellis Island in New York Harbor opened in 1892 as the main federal immigration station on the East Coast.

Immigrants were only part of urban growth. Many native-born Americans left farms as mechanization reduced the need for farm labor and cities offered jobs and excitement. Some Black Southerners moved to Northern and Western cities, and around 1879 thousands of 'Exodusters' moved to Kansas to escape violence after Reconstruction. The much larger Great Migration came later (7.6).

The urban share of Americans rose from about one in four in 1870 to about two in five in 1900. Chicago grew from about 300,000 people in 1870 to about 1.7 million in 1900.

Newcomers often settled in ethnic neighborhoods, sometimes called enclaves, such as Little Italy or Chinatown. There they found churches and synagogues, foreign-language newspapers, mutual aid societies that helped with funerals or illness, and neighbors who spoke their language.

Housing was often in tenements, crowded apartment buildings with little light, air or plumbing. Jacob Riis's photographs and his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) showed middle-class readers these conditions.

Technology reshaped cities. Steel frames and elevators made skyscrapers possible, starting in Chicago in the 1880s. Electric streetcars let middle-class families move to 'streetcar suburbs' while the poor stayed in the center, sorting neighborhoods by class as well as by ethnicity and race. City political machines (6.13) traded jobs and help for immigrants' votes.