The Experience of Old and New Immigrants: A Comparison

Abstract

We compare here turn-of-the-twentieth-century (1870s-1914) and contemporary (1965 to the present) economic, political, and socio-cultural circumstances of past and present immigrants’ lives in their home countries and in the United States and, in these contexts, those peoples’ decisions to cross the Atlantic, their most common assimilation patterns and forms of transnational engagements. In the last section of the chapter, I point out the main similarities and differences in the impact of past and present actor-immigrants on the structures of their home and host societies. The aim of this analysis is to identify the common features of the experience of members of the previous and contemporary “great waves” of American immigration and, next, to compare them to each other looking for major similarities and differences. (For other historical-comparative studies of turn-of-the-twentieth-century and contemporary immigrants in America, see Foner 2000, 2005;Min 2002;Foner and Fredrickson 2004;Perlmann 2005. See also Gibson and Lennon 1999 on historical statistics of the foreign-born population in the United States since 1850.) Because subsequent chapters on cross-border movement, integration trajectories, and home-country involvements of members of the eight present-day immigrant groups contain information with bibliographic reference to both general and group-specific contemporary studies on these issues, I illustrate and annotate here primarily turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigrant experience as recorded in contemporaneous and historical studies.