Cultural and Ethnic Differences in America

Immigration in the 19th Century and Today

One of the reasons people would be opposed to immigration today even though immigrants helped to grow this country in the 19th century is that today the US is no longer growing in the same way. People have been here for generations and they fear that more immigration will displace them from their neighborhoods or jobs or schools. They see America no longer as a land of opportunity for all but as something that they possess and that they are at risk of losing.

This was pretty much the case at the end of the 19th century, too. The original set of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who shaped the founding of the country after the Revolutionary War had carved out niches for themselves. They had a clear cultural and ethnic stronghold. The immigrants that came into the country after the Civil War and during the Industrial Revolution were from other parts of Europe and all over the world, too. They did not share the same culture as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in a lot of cases. This is because the late 19th century saw a shift in the origins of immigrants from predominantly Northern and Western Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italians, Poles, and Jews. These new immigrants were often seen as racially and culturally inferior by the existing population, who were primarily of Anglo-Saxon descent. Nativist sentiments were fueled by groups like the Know-Nothings and later the Immigration Restriction League, which promoted the idea that these new immigrants would not and could not assimilate into American culture and would erode American values and ideals and ways of life (Alsan et al.).

Religious differences were also a source of tension at the time. Many of the new immigrants were Catholics or Jews, in contrast to the predominantly Protestant native-born Americans. This led to fears of religious conflicts and the dilution of Protestant cultural dominance. It should be remembered that America was once the land of Catholic Spain and that eventually it fell to the Protestant British.