y want to come to the United States and will do whatever they have to do to achieve that goal is no surprise. America has long been a destination for immigrants from around the world, with different reasons for their movement at different times. Between 1820 and 1910, at least 38 million Europeans arrived in the United States, the result of a number of forces: the Napoleonic Wars; political disturbances in Germany, Austria-Hungary, Greece, and Poland; the Potato Famine in Ireland; religious persecutions of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Czarist Russia and other parts of Europe; the Industrial Revolution, which created thousands of unemployed workers and peasants; and a rigid social structure that supported a closed aristocracy and upper class.
Millions of people left their homelands in search of a better life. The United States at this time was expanding into the West and Southwest all the way to the Pacific Coast. The Industrial Revolution was then shaping life in the United States, and factories, timberlands, and manufacturing plants all needed workers. The masses from Europe were thus more or less welcomed as cheap labor, and the immigrants in turn found cheaper land and higher pay than they had known in Europe.
This immigration and subsequent waves from Asia did not take place without tensions. The Gold Rush in California after 1849 attracted people from all over America and from China, with many Chinese workers coming before the Civil War to provide cheap labor for the building of the railroads:
By 1882, there were approximately 300,000 low-wage Chinese laborers in America. Because they were taking jobs from U.S. citizens, because they were different in color, in culture, in habits and in looks, these new workers were targeted by Americans for antagonism and racial hatred. As a result, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, completely banning non-citizen Chinese from immigrating to the United Sta...