Immigration In The 19th Century

Immigration has been the primary way that the United States has grown since its founding as a nation. We can detect several key periods in which immigration has helped to shape its character. In the nineteenth century there were at least two critical periods of immigration. The first took place in the 1840s and 1850s when famines in Ireland drove hundreds of thousands of people to seek refuge in the United States. The Irish population of cities such as Boston and New York expanded enormously during this era (Glazer & Moynihan, 1970). The effects of the new immigrant population was to redefine many of the major social institutions of these cities. In New York, the Irish came to dominate the workings of Tammany Hall, the political bureaucracy
The consequences of international migration have been viewed in terms of social, cultural and economic outcomes. Sending societies gain seasonal or longer term employment, remittances sent home, occupational outlets to utilize developed skills and population shifts, while host societies gain a flexible, inexpensive labor reserve. Other gains come in the form of cultural enrichment and diversity, exchange of knowledge and other social interchanges (Massey et al., 1993).
No doubt, it is very important to know how migration affect economic development, growth and decline of a country. Our focus is on the interface of the immigrants’ experiences with elements of the host society. With concepts of assimilation, adjustment, acculturation and absorption, researchers have tried to deal with an intricate process of interaction between new members and established residents. We will briefly outline a process in which the general incorporation of migrants into society occurs (Sapienza et al.,