1. The Hopes of Immigrants
United States History – Unit 2

2. Emigrants to Immigrants
In the 1830s, millions of people – mostly from Europe – came to America.
Emigrants: People who leave a country
Immigrants: People who settle in a new country.
Coming to America was not easy. Most people came as steerage, the cheapest deck on the ship.
The conditions were awful. People were jammed together in filthy conditions for up to a month.

3. Steerage

4. Why did they come? Pull Factors Push Factors Freedom
Economic Opportunity
Abundant Land
Population growth
Agricultural changes
Crop failures
Industrial Revolution
Religious and political turmoil

5. Push Factors
Population growth – Better food and sanitation caused Europe’s population boom after 1750, and the land became overcrowded.
Agricultural changes – As Europe’s population grew, so did cities. Landowners wanted to make money selling food to those cities. New methods made it more efficient to farm large areas of land than to rent small plots to tenants. So landlord forced tenants off the land.

6. Crop failures– Poor harvest made it difficult for small farmers to pay their debts. Some of these farmers chose to start over in America. Crop failures also led to hunger, causing people to emigrate.
Industrial Revolution– Goods produced in factories became cheaper than goods produced by artisans. Suddenly out of work, some artisans took factor jobs. Others emigrated.
Religious/Political Turmoil– To escape religious persecution, Quakers fled Norway and Jews left Germany. Also, many Germans came to America after a revolution in Germany failed in

7. Pull Factors
Freedom– Better food and sanitation caused Europe’s population boom after 1750, and the land became overcrowded.
Economic opportunity– Immigrants sought a land where they could support their families and have a better future. Immigration often rose during times of U.S. prosperity and fell during hard times.
Abundant land – The acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession gave the United States millions more acres of land. To land-starved Europeans, America was a land of opportunity.

8. Irish Potato Famine
In 1845, a disease attacked Ireland’s main food crop, the potato, causing a severe food shortage called a famine.
The Irish Potato Famine killed 1 million people and forced many to emigrate.
By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish had fled their homeland and came to America.

9. Irish Immigration
The Irish had a long history of oppression by the British.
Arrived in the U.S. in the 1840s because of the potato famine.
Mostly settled in cities, worked in factories.
Extremely poor.

10. High Anti-Irish Sentiment
Irish were poor and slums developed in cities; people blamed Irish for crime, disease, prostitution, alcohol abuse, etc.
Irish were Catholic; most Americans were Protestant and claimed Catholics could not be trusted because they would be more loyal to the Pope than to the U.S. government (to this day, the U.S. has only had one Catholic president).
Know-Nothing Party was strongly anti-

11. U.S. Cities Face Overcrowding
The Irish, and many other immigrants flocked to American cities.
This is where the work was.
Cities became overcrowded and filthy. America was not ready for the influx of new people.

12. Some Americans Oppose Immigration
Like today, some Americans opposed immigration.
They thought that the immigrants were too foreign to learn American ways.
Immigrants faced prejudice, a negative opinion not based on facts.
Native-born Americans who wanted to eliminate foreign influence called themselves nativists. Some nativists reused to hire immigrants and put up signs like “No Irish need apply.”

14. Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah 1869

15. Building the Transcontinental Railroad
During the Civil War, the North passed laws that helped industry (because the Southern representatives couldn’t block them).
Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1863: The government would give railroad companies free land and loan them money to build the transcontinental railroad (afterwards, the railroad companies were supposed to sell the land on both sides of the track and pay back the government, but they never ended up doing that).
Two companies competed to get the most land and money:
Union Pacific (built tracks from West to East)
Central Pacific (built tracks from West to East)

16. Chinese Immigrants and the Transcontinental Railroad
The building of the railroad depended on the labor of hundreds of thousands of workers. In the West, most of the people who built the railroad were Chinese.