The Importance Of Polish Migration To America

Tyler Trojanek
Ms. Nordin
Contemporary Literature
01 May 2014
Immigration in Poland A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots (Garvey1). Polish culture plays a big part in the United States today. Most people think of Poland as always being one country but in actuality Great Poland was founded first in 966. Later on Little Poland was founded in 1047. By 1366 Great Poland and Little Poland finally decided to merge together to become Poland as we know it today. The Polish first immigrated to America in the 1800’s, mainly to seek independence because they lived in a place where that was unheard of. At the time, Poland wasn’t yet its own country and was either taken under control
Right off the bat, the poles born around the 1600’s and the 1700’s were deemed vulnerable to the religious persecution. The religious persecution was not what the people were looking for, so the poles decided to make the move to America. The polish immigrated for several other reasons. One of the main reasons that the polish immigrated was to get work where they were needed. Many poles moved to American because of the fact that they needed people who specialized in building materials for boats and the poles were the people who knew how to do it better than anyone else. The pole immigrated out of Europe and moved to the United States of America. At the time, the United States were still not what they were today. When the poles arrived there were the main states founded early on, on the eastern coast. The poles settled down where they were needed and started to pick up the work they could find. They found that it was easy to find the work they needed because people needed them to build boats—the main source of transportation at the time. A lot of polish culture came over seas when they immigrated as well. Many polish traditions such as the food they eat and even how they celebrate Easter and Christmas came to America, many of which you see millions of Polish-Americans partake in every year. Famous dishes such as bigos stew, pierogi’s, wild mushroom soup and golabki all came across when the polish immigrated. Also, polish Christmas and Easter traditions include breaking the wafer on Christmas day, pulling out the different straws from under the tablecloth to signify your what your future holds and on Easter using the palms for rituals such as casting hope for rain and a plentiful crops in the upcoming summer. As the first wave of immigration sounds reasonably good, other than the religious persecution, the second wave of immigrants from Poland is the one more commonly known today. During world war two,