What were waves of immigration?

The waves of immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century brought roughly 35 million people from Europe and other regions in three identifiable phases that transformed American demography, religion, language, and culture. The first major wave from about 1820 to 1860 brought roughly 5 million immigrants, dominated by Irish escaping the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 and Germans fleeing political turmoil after the failed revolutions of 1848.

Irish immigrants, mostly Catholic, settled primarily in northeastern cities including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where they took manual labor jobs and faced anti-Catholic prejudice that fueled the nativist Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. German immigrants, mixed Catholic and Protestant, often had more capital and skills than the Irish and settled both in cities like Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and in farming communities across the Midwest. About 1.5 million Irish and 1.5 million Germans arrived during this first wave. Smaller numbers came from Britain, Scandinavia, France, and other European countries.

The second major wave from about 1860 to 1880 brought roughly 5 million more immigrants, increasingly from Scandinavia (Swedes, Norwegians, Danes) along with continued Irish, German, and British immigration. Scandinavian immigrants concentrated in the upper Midwest, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, where the climate and farming opportunities resembled those they had left. Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast during the California Gold Rush after 1848 and to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, but their numbers were curtailed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, the first major federal law restricting immigration.

The third and largest wave from about 1880 to 1920 brought roughly 25 million immigrants, dominated by southern and eastern Europeans: Italians (4 million), Russian and other Eastern European Jews (2.5 million), Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks, and Slavic peoples from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. They settled primarily in industrial cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, providing labor for the rapidly expanding factories.

Ellis Island in New York Harbor opened on January 1, 1892 as the main immigrant processing station and admitted about 12 million immigrants by its closure in 1954. Angel Island in San Francisco Bay opened in 1910 and served as the principal Pacific entry point. Immigration peaked at about 1.3 million arrivals in 1907. The Immigration Act of May 26, 1924 imposed national origin quotas favoring northern and western Europeans and effectively ended the third great wave. Mexican immigration accelerated during World War I and continued through the twentieth century.

The waves left a lasting imprint on American religion, food, language, urban architecture, politics, and culture.