Ethnic diversity and racism played a role in dividing skilled workers (those with a craft or specialized ability) from the globe-hopping proletariat of unskilled workers (those who supplied muscle or tended machines). Skilled workers, frequently members of older immigrant groups, criticized the newcomers. One Irish worker complained, “There should be a law . . . to keep all the Italians from comin’ in and takin’ the bread out of the mouths of honest people.”

The Irish worker’s resentment brings into focus the impact racism had on America’s immigrant laborers. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, members of the educated elite as well as the uneducated viewed ethnic and even religious differences as racial characteristics, referring to the Polish or the Jewish “race.” Americans judged immigrants of southern and eastern European “races” as inferior. Each wave of newcomers was deemed somehow inferior to the established residents. The Irish who criticized the Italians so harshly had themselves been stigmatized as a lesser “race” a generation earlier.

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Immigrants not only brought their own religious and racial prejudices to the United States but also absorbed the popular prejudices of American culture. Social Darwinism, with its strongly racist overtones, decreed that whites stood at the top of the evolutionary ladder. But who was “white”? Skin color supposedly served as a marker for the “new” immigrants—“swarthy” Italians; dark-haired, olive-skinned Jews. But even blond, blue-eyed Poles were not considered “white.” The social construction of race is nowhere more apparent than in the testimony of an Irish dockworker, who boasted that he hired only “white men,” a category that he insisted excluded “Poles and Italians.” For the new immigrants, Americanization and assimilation would prove inextricably part of becoming “white.”

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For African Americans, the cities of the North promised not just economic opportunity but an escape from institutionalized segregation and persecution. Throughout the South, Jim Crow laws—restrictions that segregated blacks—became common in the decades following Reconstruction. Intimidation and lynching terrorized blacks. “To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than at the hands of a mob,” proclaimed the Defender, Chicago’s largest African American newspaper. In the 1890s, many blacks moved north, settling for the most part in the growing cities. Racism relegated them to poor jobs and substandard living conditions, but by 1900, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago had the largest black communities in the nation. Although the most significant African American migration out of the South would occur during and after World War I, the great exodus was already under way.

On the West Coast, Asian immigrants became scapegoats of the changing economy. Hard times in the 1870s made them a target for disgruntled workers, who dismissed them as “coolie” labor. Contract laborers recruited by employers, or later by prosperous members of their own race or ethnicity, represented the antithesis of free labor to the workers who competed with them. In the West, the issue became racialized, and while the Chinese were by no means the only contract laborers, the Sinophobia that produced the scapegoat of the “coolie” permeated the labor movement. Prohibited from owning land, the Chinese migrated to the cities. In 1870, San Francisco housed a Chinese population estimated at 12,022, and it continued to grow until passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (see “The Diverse Peoples of the West” in chapter 17). For the first time in the nation’s history, U.S. law excluded an immigrant group on the basis of race.

Some Chinese managed to come to America using a loophole in the exclusion law that allowed relatives to join their families. Meanwhile the number of Japanese immigrants rapidly grew until pressure to keep out all Asians led in 1910 to the creation of an immigration station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where immigrants were quarantined until judged fit to enter the United States.

On the East Coast, the volume of immigration from Europe in the last two decades of the century proved unprecedented. In 1888 alone, more than half a million Europeans landed in America, 75 percent of them in New York City. The Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886 as a gift from the people of France, stood sentinel in the harbor.

A young Jewish woman named Emma Lazarus penned the verse inscribed on Lady Liberty’s base:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Lazarus’s poem stood as both a promise and a warning. With increasing immigration, some Americans soon would question whether the country really wanted the “huddled masses” or the “wretched refuse” of the world.

The tide of immigrants to New York City soon swamped the immigration office in lower Manhattan. After the federal government took over immigration in 1890, it built a facility on Ellis Island, in New York harbor, which opened in 1892. After fire gutted the wooden building, a new brick edifice replaced it in 1900. Able to process 5,000 immigrants a day, it was already inadequate by the time it opened. Its overcrowded halls became the gateway to the United States for millions.

To many Americans the new southern and eastern European immigrants appeared backward, uneducated, and outlandish in appearance—impossible to assimilate. “These people are not Americans,” editorialized the popular journal Public Opinion, “they are the very scum and offal of Europe.” Terence V. Powderly, head of the broadly inclusive Knights of Labor, complained that the newcomers “herded together like animals and lived like beasts.” Blue-blooded Yankees led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts formed an unlikely alliance with leaders of organized labor—who feared that immigrants would drive down wages—to press for immigration restrictions. In 1896, Congress approved a literacy test for immigrants, but President Grover Cleveland promptly vetoed it. “It is said,” the president reminded Congress, “that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.”