A History of Immigration essays

A History of Immigration essays Bernard A. Weisberg refers in his articles title to the United States as a Nation of Immigrants rather than a unique, ancient grounded nation. As Joe R. Feagin states in his Racial and Ethnic Relations textbook: Immigration in the United States is its foundation, its uniqueness and its great strength. Weisberg particularly emphasizes this idea because some American people, especially of white-dominant ethnicity, have forgotten that. This is the base of a present day controversy that discusses whether the united States should give up its immigration status due to economic and political causes, actually originated since the first immigrant wave set on North American shore. According to our Western Civilization history, the first people to emigrate from Europe and colonized this North American land were the English, the Colonization migration of the XVII century. Some years after the first settlers arrived, the first British mass exodus landed from the Mayflower, approximately 155,000 in number, mostly as indentured servants, contracted for a specific term of years. Some Scottish and Irish-Scottish peoples came along with them, approximately 12,000 a year. The English government instituted later migrations to the British colonies. If not purposely driven out from their country, British people escaped from political and religious persecution towards such groups which included the Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some independent, some Jews and a few Roman Catholics, as well as the German Mennonites (ancestors of the Amish) and other 225,000 colonists and the French Calvinists called Huguenots. The following biggest wave of migration was the one in which 84,500 chained Africans slaves were sent to the colonies to work on the land. The first joint-stock companies, formed by merchants under the law of James I, settled in Jamestown and this wa...