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New Wave Immigration Research Paper

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New Wave Immigrants
I find it pretty easy to relate to the immigrants of New York in this time. I am first-generation American, with both of my parents being born in Jamaica as a part of the baby-boomer generation. My grandparents on my father’s side, Gwendolyn and Joshua, moved to Brooklyn, New York in the early 1970s from Clarendon Parish, Jamaica. Together they had brought their seven children to the United States, but never made them citizens, just permanent residences. When they became more comfortable in America, they followed the traditional suburban path and moved to Hartford Connecticut. My dad, Hugh, moved to Connecticut with them for a while, but enjoyed the freedom that the city had to offer, and moved back and met my mom shortly …show more content…
People were coming into the city at record number. However, these immigrants were different from those coming in from the earlier decades. These immigrants were from the Southeast European region. They identified as Italians, Jewish, Greek, Polish, Russians, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Armenian, and Turkish. One thing that all these immigrants have in common is that they heard that there is freedom and opportunity in New York and America, for those willing to work for it. Most of the jobs available for the new immigrants were at the growing city seaport. In the year 1907, over 1.2 million Europeans came into the city, this was labeled the “human tide”. A lot of the immigrants did not stay in the city. Most of the tides were Russian and Italian. This abrupt change in migration patterns upset the now native New Yorkers and their western counterparts. They saw this as more competition coming in to take their jobs, homes, and messing up their way of daily way of life (New York: A Documentary Film). Another ethnic group that was moving into city in large numbers at this time was the Chinese. They immigrated to Angel Island in San Francisco, and worked mostly on the very dangerous Transcontinental Railroad. When the railroad was completed in 1869, they migrated to the opportune land of New York. They settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, along Canal Street and it became known as …show more content…
On January 1, 1898, New York City was no longer just Manhattan Island. Four of its most populous outlying territories were annexed. Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Richmond (Staten Island) increased the size of the city by almost ten times and the current population to over three million. However, getting around this new city on foot or horseback would take an obscene amount of times, so a system had to be made for the average person to get around. The first underground subway line opened in 1904, although there were many above ground trains taking people around the city, the brutal winters required a different approach. And they had the perfect workforce to get the jobs done. But with all the immigrants coming in at record-breaking numbers, it was deemed necessary to have an updated immigration port. A banquet hall named Castle Garden in Battery Park, Manhattan was charged with the task of welcoming the immigrants to America. The space quickly became very inadequate to hold all those persons at a time. So the Federal Government and NYC government built the famous walls of Ellis Island building on top of an abandoned ammunition island between Manhattan and New Jersey, right across from Liberty Island. It was opened on December 17, 1907 and averaged over 12,000 immigrants a day. It did not have a good

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