The history of Immigration in New York

By Erik Sass

The story of New York has always been the story of immigrants. Immigration is central to the meaning of famous New York landmarks, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island among them, and the American press celebrates New York’s “tolerant” atmosphere, still “free-wheeling” post-9/11. But many people don’t know the dark side of the story.

The Dutch and everything after

New York did indeed begin as a remarkably welcoming place – under another name. In 1620 Dutch settlers brought a permissive attitude to “New Amsterdam.” They accepted French Huguenots, German Quakers and Mennonites, and Jews, naturalized immigrants, and even let them join in administering the colony (though not black slaves or Native Americans).

The tolerant atmosphere waned somewhat with British conquest in 1674 (when the city was renamed New York for its new owner, the Duke of York). The English conciliated the wealthy Dutch out of necessity, but otherwise restricted the social mobility and openness that distinguished New Amsterdam. Soon English became the official language, all local officials were English, and trade was confined to other English possessions overseas.

This was the city that in the early 1700s received its first wave of foreign immigration: poor German peasants fleeing the French armies of Louis XIV. These unsophisticated newcomers were greeted with disgust by the Anglo-Dutch aristocracy, who showed the same disdain for Scottish and Irish Presbyterians shortly afterwards. This set the basic “pattern,” with “natives” (actually descendants of earlier immigrants) bitterly resenting newcomers. Ironically, during this time the Anglo-Dutch aristocracy imported hundreds of thousands of “unfree whites” – the hated, illiterate and unskilled Irish, Germans, Scots, Welsh, and Swiss – to work as indentured servants on the vast plantations and manor houses of the wealthy.

And so in the late 18th century the largest immigrant population in New York’s history began to arrive – poor Irish Catholics fleeing English rule. 1845 brought the Irish Potato Famine – a fungal blight that destroyed Ireland’s staple crop over a 10-year period, killing perhaps 1 million and leaving 4 million in starvation. About 2 million Irish fled the nightmare for the New World, and New York effectively became an Irish city; an 1855 New York State census counted 175,000 (or 28%) of the city’s population as foreign-born Irish, while in 1847-1851 alone 650,000 Irish immigrants passed through en route to other destinations.

Anti-Irish hatred was more intense than any anti-immigrant resentment before. At this time the famous sign discouraging job-seekers – “No Irish Need Apply” – was ubiquitous, and an editorialist could write, “The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses... Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country.”

The most dangerous anti-immigrant group were the “Know-Nothings” (so called for their habit of claiming ignorance when confronted by the police) – “nativists” who terrorized Irish immigrants with armed gangs, scoring electoral victories beginning in 1854. Local Know-Nothing gangs opposed New York’s immigrant-dominated Tammany Hall well into the Civil War.

Thus the mass Irish migration of the 19th and 20th centuries fixed the basic template for large-scale immigration to New York both in its size (big) and the “native” reception (bad).

Drunks, thieves, and Chinese laundries

Soon Italians began arriving in large numbers, growing from a few thousand at most in 1870 to 476,000 (statewide) by 1910. Like the Irish they were reputed to be violent, irrational, passionate, sloppy, dirty, criminal, and – as Catholics – beholden in some sinister way to the Pope in Rome.

Meanwhile Poles and Swedes were held to be stupid, Germans were said to be drunks, and in line with European feeling Jews were held to be venal and greedy. Fleeing decaying empires in Austria-Hungary and Russia, Slavs of all types were supposed to be anarchists (at a time anarchists when were said to be part of an international conspiracy akin to contemporary violent Islamism).

But it would fall to another group – the Chinese – to make immigration what it is today.

In the second half of the 19th century Chinese laborers (brought to build railroads or lured by the California gold rush drifted east over the new railroads, and established Chinatown in New York’s infamous Five Points slum, previously the haunt of Irish hoodlums, with perhaps 1,000 Chinese living there by 1880. In the 1870s, illegal Chinese immigrants were smuggled into New Jersey to run hand laundries but soon fled to New York City, where they went into business for themselves.

Visibly different and culturally dissimilar in ways that stood out even in a “cosmopolitan” environment, the Chinese tended to segregate themselves in enclaves like Chinatown, which became targets for renewed “nativist” resentment. Drawing on stereotypes of Chinese immigrants as dirty, dishonest, lazy, and stupid – familiar conceits – backlash began in earnest in 1870 with the Naturalization Act, which limited citizenship to whites and blacks (local backlash began earlier in California, where an 1850 law prohibited Chinese immigrants from giving testimony against whites in court).

The Chinese Exclusion Act

Then came the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was a remarkable law because it targeted immigrants of a particular nationality as undesirable. But it has broader historical significance that transcends ethnicity. For with its passage Americans embraced the idea of limiting “undesirable” immigration (of whatever kind) through legislation – a fantasy of omnipotence that has yet to lose its grip.

The Exclusion Act gave rise to large government bureaucracies tasked with tracking the movements of legal immigrants and expelling illegal immigrants (all deemed “undesirable”). At one point the New York District Office of the newly-founded Immigration and Naturalization Service maintained open files on about 18,500 Chinese immigrants in the metropolitan area alone. Even more interesting is the real motivation behind the Chinese Exclusion Act, for its xenophobia was fueled by economic tension. Like contemporary Mexican immigrants, the Chinese were willing to perform strenuous or socially demeaning work for less money than white Americans.

Nonetheless, despite nativist backlash, between 1820 and 1924 America successfully absorbed about 40 million immigrants, with Ellis Island alone receiving a stunning 12 million between 1870 and 1924. For the promise of Ellis Island and the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty have only grown with America’s prosperity and power – as the nation is locked in perpetual struggle with itself over its allure.