Italian Immigration Experience
Immigrants Experiences from Italy to the United
States
Italian emigration was fueled by dire poverty. Life in Southern Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, offered landless peasants little more than hardship, exploitation, and violence. Even the soil was poor, yielding little, while malnutrition and disease were widespread.
Most of this generation of Italian immigrants took their first steps on U.S. soil in a place that has now become a legend—Ellis Island.
In 1907 was the peak year for Italian migration to the U.S. The voyage from Naples and New York, which is 4,188 knots, is performed by these steamers in fourteen to sixteen days, which included one days stoppage at Gibraltar.
A 15-year-old girl was the first Ellis Island …show more content…
immigrant
The first person to go through immigration processing at the Ellis
Island station was a 15year-old girl named Annie
Moore. As The New York
Times reported, the "rosycheeked Irish girl" came to
America with two younger brothers. Their parents were already in New York waiting for them.
The Italian immigrants who passed the test of Ellis Island went about transforming the city that they found before them. Many previous immigrant groups, such as those from Germany and Scandinavia, had passed through New York City in decades past, but most had regarded the city merely as a way station, and had continued on to settle elsewhere in the country. This generation of Italian immigrants, however, stopped and made their homes there; one third never got past New York City.
Immigrants’ work places could be as unhealthy as their homes. A substantial number of southern Italian immigrants had only worked as farmers, and were thus qualified only for unskilled, and more dangerous, urban labor. Many Italians went to work on the growing city’s municipal works projects, digging canals, laying paving and gas lines, building bridges, and tunneling out the New
York subway system. In 1890, nearly 90 percent of the laborers in
New York’s Department of Public Works were Italian immigrants.
Italians found work throughout the city, in many of the improvised trades that have long been a haven for immigrants, such as shoemaking, masonry, bartending, and barbering. For a time, some observers felt that Italians operated every fruit-vendor’s
cart in the city. For many immigrants, though, and especially women and children, work could only be found in sweatshops, the dark, unsafe factories that sprang up around New York. When a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911, killing 146 workers, nearly half of the victims were young Italian women.
As the 20th century moved forward, Italian immigrants moved steadily into the main currents of U.S. society. By the 1920s and
30s, the immigrant generation had begun to see their children grow up as Americans—a process that many immigrants viewed with some ambivalence. The U.S. public school system provided immigrant children with a new language, a new set of patriotic symbols, a school yard immersion in U.S. popular culture, and sometimes even a new Anglicized name. At the same time, though, this process often created a cultural gap between the second, Americanized, generation and their parents, who would always belong, at least in part, to the old country.
States
Italian emigration was fueled by dire poverty. Life in Southern Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, offered landless peasants little more than hardship, exploitation, and violence. Even the soil was poor, yielding little, while malnutrition and disease were widespread.
Most of this generation of Italian immigrants took their first steps on U.S. soil in a place that has now become a legend—Ellis Island.
In 1907 was the peak year for Italian migration to the U.S. The voyage from Naples and New York, which is 4,188 knots, is performed by these steamers in fourteen to sixteen days, which included one days stoppage at Gibraltar.
A 15-year-old girl was the first Ellis Island …show more content…
immigrant
The first person to go through immigration processing at the Ellis
Island station was a 15year-old girl named Annie
Moore. As The New York
Times reported, the "rosycheeked Irish girl" came to
America with two younger brothers. Their parents were already in New York waiting for them.
The Italian immigrants who passed the test of Ellis Island went about transforming the city that they found before them. Many previous immigrant groups, such as those from Germany and Scandinavia, had passed through New York City in decades past, but most had regarded the city merely as a way station, and had continued on to settle elsewhere in the country. This generation of Italian immigrants, however, stopped and made their homes there; one third never got past New York City.
Immigrants’ work places could be as unhealthy as their homes. A substantial number of southern Italian immigrants had only worked as farmers, and were thus qualified only for unskilled, and more dangerous, urban labor. Many Italians went to work on the growing city’s municipal works projects, digging canals, laying paving and gas lines, building bridges, and tunneling out the New
York subway system. In 1890, nearly 90 percent of the laborers in
New York’s Department of Public Works were Italian immigrants.
Italians found work throughout the city, in many of the improvised trades that have long been a haven for immigrants, such as shoemaking, masonry, bartending, and barbering. For a time, some observers felt that Italians operated every fruit-vendor’s
cart in the city. For many immigrants, though, and especially women and children, work could only be found in sweatshops, the dark, unsafe factories that sprang up around New York. When a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911, killing 146 workers, nearly half of the victims were young Italian women.
As the 20th century moved forward, Italian immigrants moved steadily into the main currents of U.S. society. By the 1920s and
30s, the immigrant generation had begun to see their children grow up as Americans—a process that many immigrants viewed with some ambivalence. The U.S. public school system provided immigrant children with a new language, a new set of patriotic symbols, a school yard immersion in U.S. popular culture, and sometimes even a new Anglicized name. At the same time, though, this process often created a cultural gap between the second, Americanized, generation and their parents, who would always belong, at least in part, to the old country.