Native Americans

The first American immigrants, beginning more than 20,000 years ago, were intercontinental wanderers: hunters and their families following animal herds from Asia to North America, across a land bridge where the Bering Strait is today. When Spain's Christopher Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492, about 1.5 million Native Americans lived in what is now the continental United States, although estimates of the number vary greatly. Mistaking the place where he landed -- San Salvador in the Bahamas -- for the Indies, Columbus called the Native Americans "Indians."

During the next 200 years, people from several European countries followed Columbus across the Atlantic Ocean to explore America and set up trading posts and colonies. Native Americans suffered greatly from the influx of Europeans. The transfer of land from Indian to European and later American hands was accomplished through treaties, wars and coercion, with Indians constantly giving way as the newcomers moved west. In the 19th century, the U.S. Government's preferred solution to the Indian "problem" was to force tribes to inhabit specific plots of land -- called reservations. Some tribes fought to keep from giving up land they had traditionally used. In many cases the reservation land was of poor quality, and Indians came to depend on government assistance. Poverty and joblessness among Native Americans still exist today.

The territorial wars, along with Old World diseases to which Indians had no built-up immunity, sent their population plummeting, to a low of 350,000 in 1920. Some tribes disappeared altogether. Nonetheless, Native Americans have proved to be resilient. Today they number about two million (0.8 percent of the total U.S. population). Only about one-third of Native Americans still live on reservations.

Countless U.S. place-names derive from Indian words, including the states of Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri and Idaho. Indians taught Europeans how to cultivate crops that are now staples throughout the world, such as corn, tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco. Canoes, snowshoes and moccasins are among the Indians' many inventions.

The Golden Door

The English were the dominant ethnic group among early settlers of what became the United States, and English became the prevalent American language. But people of other nationalities were not long in following. In 1776 Thomas Paine, a spokesman for the revolutionary cause in the colonies and himself a native of England, wrote that "Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America." These words described the settlers who came not only from Great Britain, but also from other European countries, including Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Germany and Sweden. Nonetheless, in 1780 three out of every four citizens of the United States were of English or Irish descent.

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States received its first great wave of immigrants. In Europe as a whole, famine, poor harvests, rising populations and political unrest caused an estimated five million people to leave their homelands each year. In Ireland, a blight attacked the potato crop, and upwards of 750,000 people starved to death. Many of the survivors emigrated. In one year alone, 1847, the number of Irish immigrants to the United States reached 118,120. Today there are about 39 million Americans of Irish descent.

The failure of the German Confederation's Revolution of 1848-49 led many of its people to emigrate. During the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), the U.S. Government -- the Union -- helped fill its roster of troops by encouraging emigration from Europe, especially from the German states. In return for service in the Union army, immigrants were offered grants of land. By 1865, about one in five Union soldiers was a wartime immigrant. Today, 22 percent of Americans have German ancestry.

Jews came to the United States in large numbers beginning about 1880, in the throes of fierce pogroms in eastern Europe. Over the next 45 years, two million Jews moved to the United States; the U.S. Jewish population today is more than five million.

During the late 19th century, so many people were entering the United States that Washington operated a special port of entry on Ellis Island in New York City's harbor. Between 1892, when it opened, and 1954, when it closed, Ellis Island was the doorway to the United States for 12 million people. It is now preserved as part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. The Statue of Liberty itself, a gift from France to the people of the United States in 1886, stands on an adjoining island in the harbor. The statue became many immigrants' first sight of their homeland-to-be.

Unwilling Immigrants

Among the flood of immigrants to North America, one group came unwillingly. These were Africans, 500,000 of whom were brought over as slaves between 1619 and 1808, when importing slaves into the United States became illegal. The practice of owning slaves and their descendants continued, however, particularly in the agrarian U.S. South, where many laborers were needed to work the fields.

The process of ending slavery began in April 1861 with the outbreak of the Civil War between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South, 11 of which had left the Union. On January 1, 1863, midway through the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery in those states that had seceded. Slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.

Even after the end of slavery, however, American blacks were hampered by segregation and inferior education. In search of opportunity, African Americans formed an internal wave of immigration, moving from the rural South to the urban North. But many urban blacks were unable to find work; by law and custom they lived apart from whites, in the run-down inner cities.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used boycotts, marches and other forms of nonviolent protest to demand equal treatment under the law and an end to racial prejudice.

A high point of this civil rights movement came on August 28, 1963, when more than 200,000 people of all races gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and heard a stirring speech by King. Soon afterwards, the U.S. Congress passed laws prohibiting discrimination in voting, education, employment, housing and public accommodations. Today, African Americans constitute 12.7 percent of the total U.S. population, and in recent decades blacks have made great strides, with the black middle class growing significantly.

Language and Nationality

It is not uncommon to walk down the streets of a U.S. city today and hear Spanish spoken. In 1950 fewer than four million U.S. residents were from Spanish-speaking countries. Today that number is about 27 million. About 50 percent of Hispanics in the United States have origins in Mexico. The other 50 percent come from a variety of countries, including El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Colombia. Thirty-six percent of the Hispanics in the United States live in California. Several other states have large Hispanic populations, including Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida, where hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the Castro regime have settled. There are so many Cuban Americans in Miami that the Miami Herald, the city's largest newspaper, publishes separate editions in English and Spanish.

The widespread use of Spanish in U.S. cities has generated a public debate over language. Some English speakers point to Canada, where the existence of two languages (English and French) has been accompanied by a secessionist movement. To head off such a development in the United States, some citizens are calling for a law declaring English the official language of the United States. Others consider such a law unnecessary and likely to cause harm. Recognition of English as the official language, they argue, would stigmatize speakers of other languages and make it difficult for them to live their daily lives.

Limits on Newcomers

The Statue of Liberty began lighting the way for new arrivals at a time when many native-born Americans began to worry that the country was admitting too many immigrants. Some citizens feared that their culture was being threatened or that they would lose jobs to newcomers willing to accept low wages.

In 1924 Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For the first time, the United States set limits on how many people from each country it would admit. The number of people allowed to emigrate from a given country each year was based on the number of people from that country already living in the United States. As a result, immigration patterns over the next 40 years reflected the existing immigrant population, mostly Europeans and North Americans.

Prior to 1924, U.S. laws specifically excluded Asian immigrants. People in the U.S. West feared that the Chinese and other Asians would take away jobs, and racial prejudice against people with Asian features was widespread. The law that kept out Chinese immigrants was repealed in 1943, and legislation passed in 1952 allows people of all races to become U.S. citizens.

Today Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country. About 10 million people of Asian descent live in the United States. Although most of them have arrived here recently, they are among the most successful of all immigrant groups. They have a higher income than many other ethnic groups, and large numbers of their children study at the best U.S. universities as undergraduate and graduate students.

A New System

The year 1965 brought a shakeup of the old immigration patterns. The United States began to grant immigrant visas according to who applied first; national quotas were replaced with hemispheric ones. Preference was given to relatives of U.S. citizens and immigrants with job skills in short supply in the United States. In 1978, Congress abandoned hemispheric quotas and established a worldwide ceiling, opening the doors even wider. In 1990, for example, the top 10 points of origin for immigrants were Mexico (57,000), the Philippines (55,000), Vietnam (49,000), the Dominican Republic (32,000), Korea (30,000), China (29,000), India (28,000), the Soviet Union (25,000), Jamaica (19,000), and Iran (18,000).

The United States continues to accept more immigrants than any other country; in 1990, its population included nearly 20 million foreign-born persons. The revised immigration law of 1990 created a flexible cap of 675,000 immigrants each year, with certain categories of people exempted from the limit. That law attempts to attract more skilled workers and professionals to the United States and to draw immigrants from countries that have supplied relatively few Americans in recent years. It does this by providing "diversity" visas. In 1990 about 9,000 people entered the country on diversity visas from such countries as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Peru, Egypt, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Illegal Immigrants

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that some five million people are living in the United States without permission, and the number is growing by about 275,000 a year. Native-born Americans and legal immigrants worry about the problem of illegal immigration. Many believe that illegal immigrants (also called "illegal aliens") take jobs from citizens, especially from young people and members of minority groups. Moreover, illegal aliens can place a heavy burden on tax-supported social services.

In 1986 Congress revised immigration law to deal with illegal aliens. Many of those who had been in the country since 1982 became eligible to apply for legal residency that would eventually permit them to stay in the country permanently. In 1990, nearly 900,000 people took advantage of this law to obtain legal status. The law also provided strong measures to combat further illegal immigration and imposed penalties on businesses that knowingly employ illegal aliens.

The Legacy

The steady stream of people coming to United States shores has had a profound effect on the American character. It takes courage and flexibility to leave one's homeland and come to a new country. The American people have been noted for their willingness to take risks and try new ventures, as well as for their independence and optimism. If Americans whose families have been here longer tend to take their material comfort and political freedoms for granted, immigrants are on hand to remind them how important those privileges are.

Immigrants also enrich American communities by bringing aspects of their native cultures with them. Many black Americans now celebrate both Christmas and Kwanzaa, a festival drawn from African rituals. Hispanic Americans celebrate their traditions with street fairs and other festivities on Cinco de Mayo (May 5). Ethnic restaurants and neighborhoods abound in many U.S. cities. President John F. Kennedy, himself the grandson of Irish immigrants, summed up this blend of the old and the new when he called the United States "a society of immigrants, each of whom had begun life anew, on an equal footing.

"This is the secret of America," he exclaimed, "a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dare to explore new frontiers. ..."

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This article is drawn from Portrait of the USA, a publication of the United States Information Agency, September 1997.