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The United States Immigration Commission, at the beginning of its well-known 1911 report, stigmatized the so-called "new immigrants"-persons who came from southern and eastern Europe, largely Italians, Jews, and Poles-as follows:
The old immigration movement was essentially one of permanence. The new immigration is very largely one of individuals, a considerable proportion of whom apparently have no intention of permanently changing their residence, their only purpose in coming to America being to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country (1).
The distinction had long been made by nativists and others. As early as 1888 Lord Bryce in The American Commonwealth could sneer that "new immigrants, politically incompetent" were easily corruptible (2). To be sure, the nature of American immigration changed during the Gilded Age-as it has changed during our entire history and as it is changing today. Was Gilded-Age immigration strikingly different from that which preceded it, or was it another variation in a continuously changing pattern? To answer that question, it is necessary to look at the numbers of persons involved and their origins, and to examine the sociocultural matrix in which immigrants moved.
During the Gilded Age-defined here as the period from 1871 to 1901-11.7 million persons are recorded as immigrating to the United States (3). That is considerably more than the number that immigrated to the British North American colonies and the United States in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first seven decades of the nineteenth century combined, but fewer than the 12.9 million who came in the first fourteen years of the new century. The national and ethnic composition of the immigrant population did change in the Gilded Age, as it has changed throughout our history. Britons dominated seventeenth-century migration; during the eighteenth century large numbers of Africans (4) and Germans came; in the period between the 1820s and the Civil War, Germans and Catholic Irish predominated, along with a smaller but still substantial number of Scandinavians. All of the groups named above, except for Africans, continued to come in the Gilded-Age decades and were joined by immigrants from eastern and southern Europe whose previous presence had been statistically insignificant. Table 1 shows European immigration by nation/region for the three Gilded-Age decades (5).
Those...