The old-versus-new immigrant divide was more gradual and less sharp than later nativists claimed

Evidence

Although the differences between “old” and “new” immigrants were much less sharp and the shift occurred much less abruptly than twentieth century nativists have taught us to believe, those abstractions do summarize a significant transition. In the late nineteenth century the impulse to emigrate reached progressively deeper into Europe, uprooting more and more remote peoples. The Slavic and Italian influx to Pennsylvania began in the seventies, and by 1880 the Great Lakes region also had substantial clusters of Poles, while New York’s Lower East Side contained crowded districts of Italians and Russo-Polish Jews.”* That year saw a sudden jump in immigration from Italy and Hungary; in the next, pogroms hurried a mass exodus of Jews from the Russian Empire. Throughout the eighties, Italian, Slavic, and Yiddish immigration increased. The peasants from these lands beyond the Alps lived much closer to serfdom than did the folk of western Europe, who were still pouring into the United States in undiminished numbers; and the eastern European Jews were seeing a world outside of the ghetto for the first time. By western European standards, the masses of southern and eastern Europe were educationally deficient, socially backward, and bizarre in appearance. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 386

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s research: shows the ‘racialized enemy’ binary was itself a later nativist retroactive construction flattening a gradual transition. — connects to: The old-new immigration distinction was read backward onto the eighties by later nativists — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 383; The new immigration was actually a gradual deepening reach into remoter European lands — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 386

Broader Connections

• The old-new immigration distinction was read backward onto the eighties by later nativists #corroborates (0.90) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 383
• The new immigration was actually a gradual deepening reach into remoter European lands #corroborates (0.80) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 386