Immigration DBQ

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From 1880 to 1925, America looked to bolster its economy by allowing immigrants to freely come into the country. They came from Europe, specifically parts of the North and West then there were those who came from the Southern and Eastern parts of Europe. The American people’s greeting to them was varied some welcomed them with open arms while others believe that they were here to take their jobs. Religion, economics, and racism, were all elements of the imbalance between American born people and immigrant groups. The United States government proceeded by implementing antagonistic laws for the amount of immigrants coming into the country. Religion was a huge factor with immigration between 1880 to 1925. According to document G, “... as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for …show more content…

According to document C, “That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor.” Working class Americans known as The National People’s Party also known as the Populist Party were now seeing immigrants as beggars looking for handouts in a land that was not their own. (Document C). The hostile response to these new immigrants was known as nativism or the nativist movement a movement to ensure that native-born Americans received better treatment than immigrants did. In 1894, Prescott Hall founded the Immigration Restriction League. The League’s goal was to restrict immigration, and impose literacy tests. In response to these views, the government took action and passed a number of restrictive laws on

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