Immigration: Historic Homage

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As early as 1782, it was already evident that the American experiment would produce something new in the history of human societies. "This is every man's country," wrote French-born Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, "Here, individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." Even as Crèvecoeur wrote, the U.S. was a polyglot mix of English and Scotch, Irish and French, Dutch, German and Swedish.*

In the early years, the voluntary immigrants came in trickles, driven from Europe by poverty or persecution: the Puritans seeking a place to worship in New England, the bedeviled Quakers fleeing to Pennsylvania as a haven, the Huguenots escaping to South Carolina from France's intolerant Sun King. But it was not until 1840 that the tide really began to flow, and it did not ebb for nearly a century. A blight in Ireland and a pogrom in Russia, a famine in Scandinavia and civil strife in South China, starvation in Sicily and crop failures in Greece, a wave of political repression in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—all fed the tide. It crested in the decade 1905-14, when more than 10,100,000 men, women and children poured into the U.S., most of them through the grim portals of New York Harbor's Ellis Island.

Magnates & Musicians. The newcomers inestimably enriched the U.S., making it the mast incredibly diverse nation on earth. Even today, 34% of the Northeast is composed of "foreign stock," a Census Bureau classification that includes those born outside the U.S. and those who have at least one parent born outside the country. More than 20% of the population of California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and 15 other states are of foreign stock. The immigrants helped to build the great cities and shift the balance of American life away from the farm. Half of the people in New York, Boston and Detroit, two-fifths of those in Los Angeles, one-third of those in Chicago and Cleveland are of foreign stock.

The list of immigrants and their sons who helped to mold American art and industry, politics and science is endless. There were Steel Magnate Andrew Carnegie (Scotland), Fur Trader John Jacob Astor (Germany), Inventor Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland), the Du Fonts from France and Yeast Tycoon Charles L. Fleischmann from Hungary. German-born Albert Einstein, Hungarian-born Edward Teller and Italian-born Enrico Fermi helped the U.S. to unlock the atom's secrets. There have been more immigrant musicians than one can shake a baton at, from Irving Berlin (Russia) and Victor Herbert (Ireland) to Artur Rubinstein (Poland) and Dimitri Mitropoulos (Greece).

One had to go no farther than the chamber of the U.S. Senate as the new bill was passed last week to see how variegated the U.S. is. In the presiding officer's chair sat Hubert Humphrey, son of a Norwegian mother. Much in evidence were Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, whose parents hailed from counties Kilkenny and Limerick, and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, son of Germans. In the semicircular rows that arced to the rear of the chamber sat New York's Jack Javits, son of an Austrian and a Palestinian; Hawaii's Hiram Fong, whose parents were born in China; Connecticut's Abe Ribicoff, son of Poles; Rhode Island's John Pastore, son of Italians.