Where did "new stock" immigrants come from?
Prior to the 1880s, most immigrants to the U.S. were from Northern and Western Europe, including Britain and Germany. These people were often referred to as old stock immigrants. Beginning in the 1880s, new stock immigrants arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italy, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and other nations.
Between 1890 and 1917, 70 percent of immigrants to the U.S. were from Southern and Eastern Europe, while 20 percent were from Northern and Western Europe. Many of these newer arrivals were Catholic and Jewish. The rate of immigration to the U.S. increased tremendously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: between 1870 and 1900, some 11 million immigrants entered the U.S. Between 1900 and 1920, more than 15 million more immigrants arrived.
In response to this influx of immigrants, in 1890 the U.S. government began constructing a facility at Ellis Island, which lies off the coast of New Jersey, to process new immigrants. Ellis Island was opened in 1892. For millions of immigrants, this was the gateway to America. The huge number of immigrants transformed American life. By 1900, 60 percent of the population of America's twelve largest cities were of foreign stock (either immigrants or the children of immigrants). The proportion of "foreign stock" was as high as 80 percent in New York and 87 percent in Chicago.
Other immigrants came to the U.S. from Mexico and Asia. Between 1850 and 1882, thousands of Chinese immigrated to the Western U.S. where they worked in mining, building railroads, and other occupations. These immigrants were often treated harshly by white American settlers. In California, for example, Chinese immigrants were barred from testifying against whites in courts of law. In 1882, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited further Chinese immigration into the nation and barred those Chinese already in the U.S. from becoming naturalized citizens.