Why come to the United States?
Leaving China
During the 19th century, large numbers of Chinese immigrants came to the United States to work. Employers often sponsored these migrants, paying for them to make the trip across the Pacific. Most Chinese immigrants worked hard labor jobs, including for the railroad companies.
Almost without exception, Chinese immigrants to the American West during this period came from the Pearl River Delta in the southeastern part of China. The Pearl River Delta suffered from the impact of British colonialism, and from frequent civil wars and the resulting unstable and often repressive government regimes. The region also experienced a series of floods, further devastating already poor families. Sending large numbers of migrants elsewhere became a necessary part of the region’s economic survival. Migrants found employment abroad and sent money home, becoming integral parts of the economic system. Most migrants did not plan to settle abroad permanently, and many railroad workers eventually became financially stable enough to return to China. Those who stayed in the United States often found work in industries like mining, or opened Chinese restaurants or laundries.
Leaving Ireland
The Irish immigration waves are the most famous of the mass migrations to the United States. The Great Famine of 1845-1849 is the most well known, but Ireland suffered a series of disastrous crop failures throughout the first half of the 19th century. Relief from England was slow to come, when it came at all, and hundreds of thousands of people fled the country.
Like other migrant groups, Irish immigrants to the United States often found work building railroads. Also like other migrant groups, Irish immigrants sent money back to their homeland, boosting its economy and maintaining their ties with family and friends still in Ireland. Although the Catholic Irish were not looked upon kindly by the mainly Protestant US-born white population, they were not subject to quite the same harsh anti-migration laws as their Asian counterparts. Eventually, Irish-American communities would come to define some parts of the United States, carving out a culture of their own and becoming an integral part of the American identity.
Leaving Japan
The Meiji restoration in the late 1860s caused Japan to industrialize rapidly. As part of this growth, Japanese citizens were encourage to find work abroad, creating ties with other nations and lessening the pressure of trying to find work in Japan.
Japanese immigrants to the United States were initially treated better than Chinese migrants were. Through an elaborate system of visas, the governments of Japan and the United States tried to regulate how many immigrants entered the United States, and what percentage of those were low skill workers. Like other groups of low skill workers, some Japanese migrants found work on the railroads, particularly after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1924, after pressure from labor unions and western states, migration from Japan was officially forbidden. However, by this point a generation of American-born children of immigrants had been born, giving Japanese communities a foothold denied to their Chinese colleagues.
Leaving Italy
Italian migration to the United States has largely been the result of poor economic conditions in Italy. Until 1861, Italy was not a unified country. Tensions between the different states led to political instability and unrest. International European conflicts, which occurred regularly through to the end of World War II, further destabilized the Italian states. The result was regular migration by large numbers of Italian nationals, who left their homeland to settle around the world, including in the United States.
Like other low skill migrants, many Italians ended up working for the railroads. Like their fellow European Catholic immigrants, Italians were often disliked by natural-born citizens of the United States, but were not subject to the same level of racial discrimination and legal pressure as migrants from Asia or as US-born African American workers. As a result, Italian communities were able to integrate themselves more easily into the larger fabric of American culture. This integration, as with that of German and Japanese Americans, was threatened during World War II, as paranoia and xenophobia swept the nation.
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