so it’s important to remind ourselves of our rich history...of where we all came from

to create this one-of-a-kind melting pot of people that is the United States in the 21st

century.

The first successful colony in America was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia

by English settlers. But, these first europeans arrived in a land that was already home to

other people. To indigenous, Native Americans who thousands of years before had crossed

over a land bridge from Siberia into what’s now the state of Alaska. They were the first

explorers of this beautiful land, and they would spread throughout the entire continent

and throughout central and southern America too. Native Americans thrived by harnessing

the power of nature, and over time, they formed into many distinct groups, each with their

own languages and cultures.

Then, in 1492, as legend has it, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and arrived

in the Bahamas and immediately encountered a group of these indigenous people called

the Arawak. The Arawak were curious and friendly, but Columbus was filled with greed, and took

some of them prisoner, demanding they show him where the gold they were wearing came

from. Now, the Native Americans were so easy going and poorly armed compared to these Europeans

- who had modern weaponry like metal-forged swords and armor, and even guns - that Columbus

said “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.”

And that’s exactly what he, and other Spanish conquistadors who came after him, did. They

vanquished indigenous group after indigenous group with cunning and sheer brutality, and

got a lot of help from diseases like smallpox that moved ahead of them and just wiped the

natives out.

“When smallpox was taken to the new world nobody in the new world had every seen a disease

like this before. So the number of people who were susceptible was much greater. There

was no natural immunity, so the number of people who could contract the disease and

then spread, and the number of people to receive it once it’s been spread, was much higher.”

“Some scholars think there may have been a population of 20 million native americans

and the vast majority, perhaps 95%, were killed by old world diseases. A continent virtually

emptied of its people.

Once word of the discovery of the New World spread throughout the Old World - the kingdoms

and empires of Europe - many people began to plan journeys of their own across the Atlantic

Ocean. Starting around 1620, tens of thousands of British, German and Dutch - but mostly

British Puritans - came to North America to escape religious persecution, or to search

for better opportunity, or simply for an adventure. The Puritans spread throughout New England

in the northeast, the Dutch settled along the Hudson River in New York and established

rich, successful trading posts and cities like New Amsterdam (which we now call New

York City). English Quakers established the Pennsylvania colony and its commercial center,

Philadelphia. More than 90% of these early colonists became farmers. And, because they

were living in small, widespread villages, disease didn’t spread as easily as it could

back in Europe, which kept the death rate among settlers in America low. All these farmers

needed large families to help them farm, which caused the population to boom, especially

in the New England colonies. As land became harder to come by along the coasts, the roughly

350,000 Scottish and Northern Irish who arrived throughout the 1700’s settled inland in

western Pennsylvania and along the Appalachians deep into the south. The British sent 60,000

prisoners across the ocean to Georgia, although the only thing many of these men were guilty

of was being poor and out of work.

Tobacco was a highly profitable cash crop in the southern colonies, so many British

settled there and began to take advantage of the thriving slave trade.

“Those of us who study immigration history think in terms of why people leave their homelands

and why they come here. And those are generally encapsulated in two words: push and pull.

Something pushes them out of their homeland and something pulls them to the United States.

Now obviously in the earliest cases of slavery they were not necessarily pushed from their

homeland, but they were taken from their homeland. But the reason why they were taken was because

there was labor to be done here in the United States. It was a global force, the slave trade

was fairly global - at least in the Atlantic - and later Asia would become involved in

it as well. So here you have a forced migration.”

Hundreds of thousands of Africans were mercilessly captured and taken prisoner in their own lands,

then put on ships bound for America, where they were sold into a life of hard labor for

no pay, and no chance at freedom.

[Graph] This is the population breakdown of the country around 1790, shortly after the

colonies’ hard-won war of independence with the British and the adoption of the American

constitution, which made the country of the United States official. The Native American

population was so decimated by disease, war, and migration to the west, that only about

100,000 were left inside the territorial United States.

Out west, many Spaniards moved north from Mexico across the Rio Grande to settle in

California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Not all of these settlers were of European

descent. They all could speak spanish, but ethnically, they were a melting pot of whites,

Indians and mestizos, or people of mixed race.

French settlers established footholds mainly along the Saint Lawrence River and the Great

Lakes, along the Mississippi River, and along the Gulf Coast, establishing the city of New

Orleans. Their descendants are known as Cajuns.

These French and Spanish populations would be incorporated into the United States in

the coming decades through the Louisiana Purchase and the granting of statehood to the western

territories.

After more than four decades of relatively little immigration into America after its

founding, in the 1830’s, tens of thousands of immigrants began arriving on her eastern

shores, again, mainly from Britain, Ireland and Germany. Some were attracted to the cheap

farmland that was made available by westward expansion, while others took advantage of

the manufacturing boom in the cities sparked by the industrial revolution. The Irish were

mainly unskilled laborers who built most of the railroads and canals, took jobs in the

emerging textile mill towns in the Northeast, or worked in the ports. About half of the

Germans became farmers, mainly in the midwest, and the other half became craftsman in urban

areas. Asian immigrants - mainly from China - began crossing the Pacific to work as laborers,

particularly on the transcontinental railroad or in the mines.

[History Professor Scott Wong] “Immigration also during the 19th century was usually male

dominated—males in their prime working years between the years of 18-25. The Irish being

the one exception. Eventually there would be more Irish women who immigrated than Irish

men. Immigrants to this day often follow established patterns. They leave on village or one city

and go to another city in the United States because someone has already established that

pattern for them. People go to where they know people. And those people here can often

arrange for jobs and places to live and so on. It was often said that your first job

coming off the boat was whoever picked you up at the docks. Now people say your first

job is whoever picked you up at the airport.

[Show graph] After tripling from the decade before, in

just two more decades, from the 1830s to the 1850s, the amount of immigrants arriving in

the US each year tripled again, to about 170,000.

By the 1850s, when the total population of the country passed 20 million and things began

to get a bit crowded, America’s first measurable anti-immigrant feelings began to take root,

mainly targeting Irish-catholic immigrants who were arriving in large numbers to escape

the poverty and death of the potato famine that was hitting them hard at home. But with

a huge boom on the horizon, this early xenophobia was nothing compared to what would come later.

Large, steam-powered ships took to the seas after 1880, replacing the older, slower sailing

ships, which meant it was suddenly much faster - and cheaper - to cross the ocean, making

the dream of a journey to America more accessible to many around the world.

“Processed and ticketed, they waited for their ship. They boarded in many parts of

Europe and in many kinds of vessels. Most to New York and some to other ports. But they

had one thing in common—they were traveling steerage, and the steamship companies understood

the profit in numbers.”

[Chart] Before long, millions of immigrants were arriving

on America’s shores. They passed through immigration processing stations like Ellis

Island in New York and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. This wave was much more diverse

than before. Coming mainly from Southern Europe, it was led by Italians, Poles, Greeks, Swedes,

Norwegians, Hungarians, Jews, Lebanese, and Syrians.

“It was as if god’s great promise had been fulfilled. I’m going into a free land.

I don’t think I ever can explain the feeling I had that time. It’s not my native land,

but it means more to me than my native land—it means more to me than my native land…Any

country on earth this never happen. And become a human being again--it’s a miracle...everybody

had hopes. And one thing I was sure, and thousands like me: that the degradation, and the abuse,

and the piration that we had in Europe, we wouldn’t have here.”

This group was young, most were under 30 years old, mainly because an entire generation of

the children of farmers and factory workers in Europe and the Russian empire couldn’t

find work because the owners of the farms and factories preferred to have an efficient

machine - that they didn’t have to pay - do the work instead of a human being. Well, this

was fine by America, whose steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production industries

were booming. It happily took in this pool of eager, hard workers and put them to work

in its growing industrial cities.

“As mills and factories sprouted across the land, cities grew up around them. In turn,

the cities beckoned to workers by the millions from the American countryside and from overseas

to fuel the burgeoning industrialization. What was once a rural nation was rapidly becoming

an urban state. From 1860 to 1910, the urban population grew from over 6 million to over

44 million.”

The United States also took full advantage of Europe’s paralyzation during the first

World War. With millions dying in the midst of the bloodiest struggle the European continent

had ever seen, every country there had to completely focus its industries on producing

all the supplies - the guns, the uniforms, the tanks, the boats, the bullets - all the

stuff needed to carry on and win the fight. But with many of its working-aged men on the

front lines, in hospitals or at home after horrific injuries - or dead - the factories

of Europe couldn’t meet all the demand, so US factories made up for the shortfall

in production. Before long, the United States had leapt to the front ranks of the world’s

economic giants. And when the Americans entered the conflict themselves in 1917, US industry

was now tasked with supplying its own soldiers too.

It was during this 50-year immigration wave, from about 1870-1920, when many well-off,

white, native-born Americans began to consider mass immigration a danger to the health and

security of the country. They started actively organizing to exert political power to slow

it down. The first immigration law in American history was known as the Asian Exclusion Act.

It was passed in 1875 and - you guessed it - outlawed Asians, specifically Asian contract

laborers, from stepping foot on American soil, plus any other people considered convicts

in their own countries.

In 1921, Congress pushed through a law that marked a turning-point in American immigration

policy--a law that passed the Senate 78-1. The Emergency Quota Act set strict limits

on the amount of immigrants who would be allowed into the country each year. It was very effective.

The number of new immigrants let in fell from over 800,000 in 1920 to just over 300,000

admitted in 1921. [CHART]

If the pace of immigration had been like a raging river, this law acted like a dam. But

that drop off in the flow of persons into America still didn’t satisfy the anti-immigration

crowd who, just three years later in 1924, forced congress to tighten the quota even

more, established the border patrol, and stated that any undocumented immigrants who entered

the country were subject to deportation. It’s during this time that the definition of “illegal

alien” was born, a term that would be used to stigmatize the next group the anti-immigration

community’s crosshairs became fixed on: latin-american migrants living and working

in the US Southwest.

After the quota laws passed by the US Congress in the 1920’s, immigration was capped for

the first time in American history.

One of the exceptions to the strict quotas were documented contract workers from the

western hemisphere who could come into and out of the US freely. The other major exception

were the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were allowed in, mainly Jews escaping

the horrors of the Holocaust during and after World War II, and the roughly 400,000 families

who fled Cuba after the Castro-led revolution of 1959. The US entrance into World War II

also meant many more Mexican workers were needed to fill in for all the young American

men who were off fighting the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. At the end

of this period, between 1944 and 1954, the number of immigrants coming from Mexico increased

by 6,000 percent, as many Latin American workers were offered low wage agricultural jobs in

the American Southwest as part of the bracero program. But large numbers of Mexicans without

the necessary paperwork came in search of the American dream too, and what followed

is one of the ugliest periods in US immigration history.

With pressure mounting to do something about the thousands of immigrants easily crossing

the southern border each year, President Eisenhower turned to Gen. Joseph Swing, who launched

“Operation Wetback” in 1954. That derogatory name reveals the insensitivity of the policy,

which directed hundreds of federal officials to lead thousands of local police officers

on sweeps through neighborhoods throughout the American southwest, stopping any “Mexican