Why did people immigrate?

People immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily seeking economic opportunity and escaping poverty, but also fleeing political persecution, religious discrimination, military conscription, famine, and ethnic violence in their homelands. Economic opportunity was the most common motive. Wages in the United States were two to three times higher than in most European countries during the late nineteenth century. Land was available cheaply or free under the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862. Industrial jobs in mining, steel, textiles, meatpacking, and railroads paid wages that, while low by modern standards, were sufficient to support families and send remittances home. American agricultural land was vastly more abundant than the small plots most European peasants worked.

Letters from earlier immigrants describing American conditions circulated widely in European villages, drawing chain migration of relatives and neighbors. Specific economic crises drove specific waves. The Irish Potato Famine of 1845 to 1852 killed about 1 million people and caused another 1 million to emigrate, mostly to the United States. The agricultural depression in southern Italy in the 1880s and 1890s drove perhaps 4 million Italians to emigrate, with about three quarters going to the United States. The collapse of the Russian peasant economy after the 1861 emancipation of serfs and the failure of the 1905 Revolution drove millions of Russians and Poles westward.

Persecution drove millions more. Russian and Eastern European Jews fled escalating pogroms after 1881, when the assassination of Tsar Alexander II triggered government-tolerated violence against Jewish communities; about 2 million Jews emigrated to the United States by 1924. Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians fled various religious conflicts. Armenians fled Ottoman massacres in the 1890s and the genocide of 1915 to 1923. Political dissidents fled failed revolutions, including the German radicals after 1848, Italians after the failed Risorgimento republican revolts, Polish nationalists after the failed 1863 January Uprising against Russia, and Russian socialists after 1905.

Military conscription drove young men from many countries seeking to escape years of compulsory service in the German, Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, and Italian armies. Family reunification accelerated immigration as established immigrants sponsored relatives and helped pay their passage. Religious freedom remained a draw, especially for sects facing established church taxes or restrictions in their home countries. Mormons, Mennonites, Hutterites, Pietists, and others established religious communities in the West.

The cumulative effect of these motives produced a population that was about 14 percent foreign-born in 1910, the highest percentage in American history until the recent decades. Most immigrants traveled by steamship in steerage class, paying about 25 to 35 dollars per passage from Europe.