New immigrants and the growth of American cities, 1877-1924

From the 1880s to the 1920s, more than 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States, many of them "new immigrants" from Southern and Eastern Europe, such as Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire, as well as immigrants from Asia and Mexico. Many entered through Ellis Island in New York (opened 1892) or Angel Island in San Francisco. They filled factory jobs and crowded into fast-growing cities, often living in cramped, unhealthy tenements, and reformers like Jane Addams, who founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889, offered services to help them. Many native-born Americans responded with nativism, hostility toward immigrants: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned most Chinese immigration, and the Immigration Act of 1924 set national quotas that sharply cut immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and barred most immigrants from Asia. Meanwhile, beginning around 1910, the Great Migration carried millions of African Americans from the rural South to Northern and Western cities to escape Jim Crow and find industrial jobs.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report