Immigration In The Late 1800s

Although waves of immigrants are separated by what time period they came from and where, they still share certain commonalities. From the 1850’s to the late 1900’s there was a boom in immigration that came in waves. Most of these waves can be traced back as economical and political struggles. Some of these immigrants included Chinese, Vietnamese, and Hispanics, who came for a numerous amount of reasons such as employment, escaping war times, and hopes of a better life. While immigration into the United States often comes in waves of people searching for a better life, in most cases they were met with hostility and repulsion.

As a result of the political status of their country, well over 300,000 Chinese immigrated to America in hopes of …show more content…
The first were Military personnel and Trained professionals due to their entanglement with the United States making them a target for communist parties. The second wave of refugees were the boat people in the late 1970’s. The final wave was between 1980 and 1990 and contained less refugees than either of the previous two waves. A combination of these along with other factors is one of the dominant reasons why the population jumped from 261,729 in 1980 to 1,548,449 only 30 years later in 2010. In 1975, around 130,000 Vietnamese were flown back to different U.S territories such as the Wake Islands, Guam, and the Philippines in fear of retaliation due to working with the U.S through the Vietnam War. Without the help from the United States, those 130,000 refugees most likely would 've ended up in one of many communist re-education camps that were being used. Although the government was very supportive to the Vietnamese through this entire process, you couldn 't say the same for how the American population treated them. As they did back in their home country, the Vietnamese fished in America but due to not being able to speak english well, they often broke local customs causing a stir. Sometimes these heated situations would then turn into something larger such as on “August, 1979, when several Vietnamese boats were burned, and a vacant Vietnamese home was firebombed. A fight between white and Vietnamese fisherman …show more content…
Because of this, more immigrants were bound to be able to get into the United States. In 1980 there was about 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S, that number then spiked up to 11.6 million as of 2013. Just like any other countries immigration, Mexico had four main waves which all had an underlying relation with the Bracero program which was Mexico contracting temporary labor contractors to the United States. The Bracero Program alone needed 75,000 workers for the railroad and 50,000 on agriculture at any given moment. Also in the early 1940’s the U.S set up a program to import temporary agricultural workers from Mexico as a reaction to the shortage of workers from the war. Over the next 20 years about 4.8 million workers came over to provide labor. With the amount of job opportunities that were open at the time, even if you were not able to illegally come there was still a chance that you could apply for one of the jobs and come to America legally. Even though the Mexican immigrants had jobs and were working hard, things still didn 't go smoothly. One of the most famous examples of this is the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 where there were Anglo American Sailors and Marines targeted Mexicans. 150 people ended up getting injured and over 500 Mexicans were arrested and charged from rioting to vagrancy. Similar to how the Vietnamese were treated, the Mexican immigrants were