Migration

To increase the labor supply in the southern colonies of North America and in the Caribbean colonies, men and women from Africa were transported to the Americas and sold as slaves. To the 1830s more Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas. The forced migration of African people occurred in stages, thus preventing them from reestablishing their lives in terms of ethnocultural groups. African Americans were relegated to a status as domestic dependents. The American concept of e pluribus unum applied only to freeborn white Europeans, who were the model of Michel Crèvecoeur's new American man (Letters from an American Farmer, 1782). Twentieth-century scholarship reconceptualized the process of the (re)peopling of the Americas, examining not just the history of free migration but that of involuntary (economically induced) migration, forced migration, and destruction of the Amerindians.

Migration to the United States during the nineteenth century, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914, has traditionally been divided into two stages that involved two different regions of origin and thus two different "racial" groups: an early agrarian "old" immigration from west-central and northern Europe and an urban "new" immigration from eastern and southern Europe starting in the mid-1880s. The distinction dates from the late nineteenth century, when the darker-complected "new immigrants" were considered racially inferior. The Eurocentric perspective covers the vast majority of newcomers, but importation of enslaved Africans, outlawed in 1808, continued illegally. Chinese of several cultural groups from the empire's southern provinces and other migrants from Asia arrived from the mid-1840s in Pacific Coast cities as merchants, prospectors, and credit-ticket laborers. The racial hierarchy of white America was extended to Mexican-Americans following territorial gains of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. The process of hierarchization included religion along with race, placing non-Christian Africans, "heathen" Chinese, and Roman Catholic "papists" in categories below that of white Anglo Protestants.

Only one-third of the migrants to the United States in the 1840s were agriculturalists. Eastern European farming families first arrived in the 1840s, while the northern European industrial laborers came after the 1880s. On average the male-female ratio stood at 60 to 40. The new states in the West sought to increase their economic potential and revenues, and the fast-growing industries in the East actively recruited newcomers from Europe. Railroad construction companies did the same in Asia. An anti-immigrant or nativist movement emerged in the 1850s; exclusion of "the Chinese"—a summary term for people from different cultures and dialects from the empire's southern provinces—which was first attempted in 1879, became law in 1882. The designation immigrant, once reserved for newcomers from Europe and contrasted to sojourners from Asia, reveals a dichotomy, with emigrants as the complementary term used in Europe. Agrarian settler families, who sold their possessions before departing for America, could hardly return to their native lands, but labor migrants often came as temporary workers. Return migrants, estimated at 7 million from the 1820s to the 1930s, were not counted by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics before 1907: The image of "immigration country" captured statisticians' minds and prevented them from even looking for returnees. The emigrant–immigrant dichotomy also hides internal migrants: Europe's societies of origin experienced far more internal migration than emigration; like the North American societies, most were labor-importing ones. U.S. internal migration, rather than being merely a westward colonization and mining movement, involved west-east rural-to-urban migration, the so-called Great Migration of African–Americans from southern agriculture to northern industries, as well as numerous other smaller moves.