The Making of American Culture

America is a melting pot. A combination of many different ethnic groups, cultures and religions.

The history of immigration to America is the history of the creation of America itself and it's culture.

Below, are the "ingredients" that were and are still required to make America and it's culture, what it is today.

The technique? The ability to "meld" together all of these different ethnic groups, cultures and religions.

In the process, no one ethnic group, culture or religion has been allowed to fall out of balance, to take control of or empower the others. This is what makes America unique and great.

America's culture is made up of the world's culture.

Please note: This is only meant to be a synopses of American immigration. If I have left anyone out, I apologize.

* Pre-Columbian Migrations: The First American Immigrants
The earliest known inhabitants of what is now the United States are thought to have arrived in Alaska by crossing the Bering land bridge, at least 14,000 – 30,000 years ago. Some of these groups migrated south and east, and over time spread throughout the Americas. These were the ancestors to modern Native Americans in the United States and Alaskan Native peoples, as well as all indigenous peoples of the Americas.

* Colonial Period
The term colonial history of the United States refers to the history of the land that would become the United States from the start of European settlement to the time of independence from Europe, and especially to the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain which declared themselves independent in 1776. Starting in the late 16th century, the Spanish, the British, the French, Swedes and the Dutch began to colonize eastern North America. Many early attempts—notably the Lost Colony of Roanoke—ended in failure, but successful colonies were soon established.

* Spanish Immigration
In 1513 the Spanish explorer, Ponce De Leon discovered Florida. Five years later another captain from Spain, Cabeza de Vaca, led a small party that explored parts of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Other Spanish adventurers who made important discoveries included Francisco Coronado who traveled up the Colorado River (1540) and Hernando de Soto who explored the Mississippi River (1541).

* English Immigration
The first English colonizing expeditions in the New World were financed by Walter Raleigh (1552–1618; also spelled Ralegh), the daring and adventurous navigator (a person who sets the course of a ship), poet, explorer, and special favorite of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), who ruled from 1558 to 1603.

* Scots and Scotch-Irish Immigration
From 1763 to 1775, 55,000 Scotch-Irish from Ulster and 40,000 Scots arrived in America. Since Scotland was able to pursue its own colonies in the New World, several small colonies were established in the early seventeenth century in East Jersey and South Carolina. These colonies were primarily for Quakers and Presbyterians who were experiencing religious persecution by the then Episcopalian Church of Scotland.

Many Scotch-Irish joined the mass migrations to the New World brought on by the Potato Famine of the 1840s. Substantial numbers of Scots also immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century to work in industry.

* French and Dutch Immigration
The history of French immigration to the United States involves a number of patterns. In only a few cases did groups of French citizens make a collective decision to leave France for the United States. Instead, typical French immigrants came as individuals or families seeking change or economic opportunity.

The Dutch first arrived in America in 1609 when the Dutch East India Company vessel De Halve Maen, commanded by the English captain, Henry Hudson, laid anchor at Sandy Hook, before sailing up what is now known as the Hudson River.

* African American Immigration
The first black men and women arrived in mainland North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying European explorers. For the next century or so, they continued to trickle onto the continent in small numbers, often not from Africa itself but from Europe, the Antilles, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral.

* German Immigration
German emigration to America did not take place in any significant numbers until the beginning of the 18th century. In 1708 the British government began to encourage Protestants from Germany to settle in America.

* Irish Immigration
In 1816 around 6,000 Irish people sailed for America. Within two years this figure had doubled.

* Scandinavian Immigration
Although Sweden sent more emigrants to the United States than any other Scandinavian country, Norway sent a greater percentage of its population—nearly 1 million people between 1820 and 1920. Indeed, some estimates suggest that during the great immigrations of the 19th century Norway lost a higher proportion of its people to the U.S. than any country other than Ireland.

Emigration from Norway to North America started more slowly, however. Some Norwegian adventurers accompanied Dutch colonists to New Amsterdam in the 17th century, and members of the Moravian religious sect joined German Moravians in Pennsylvania in the 18th.

By the end of the 1860s there were more than 40,000 Norwegians in the U.S. More than one-ninth of Norway's total population, 176,000 people, came in the 1880s.

* Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Immigration
The first Chinese immigrants arrived in 1820 according to U.S. government records. Fewer than 1,000 are known to have arrived before the 1848 California Gold Rush which drew the first significant number of laborers from China who mined for gold and performed menial labor.
There were 25,000 immigrants by 1852, and 105,465 by 1880, most of whom lived on the West Coast.

Some of the earliest Japanese immigration to lands that would later become part of the United States was illegal. In 1868, the Hawaiian consul general secretly hired and transported 148 contract laborers to Hawaii, although they were eventually discovered and returned. Beginning in the 1880s, however, legal barriers to emigration began to drop, and major emigration soon followed.

Between 1886 and 1911, more than 400,000 men and women left Japan for the U.S. and U.S.-controlled lands, and significant emigration continued for at least a decade beyond that.

Filipinos were the first Asians to cross the Pacific Ocean as early as 1587, fifty years before the first English settlement of Jamestown was established. From 1565 to 1815, during the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade, Filipinos were forced to work as sailors and navigators on board Spanish Galleons.

* Jewish Immigration
The Jewish immigration history America started in 1860. In this year 200,000 German Jews immigrated to USA. From 1882 to 1914, 2 million Jews immigrated from eastern Europe to USA.

* Italian and Greek Immigration
The first sizable Italian immigration to North America involved certain religious refugees, the Waldensians, who migrated from Holland in 1657.

During the mass emigration from Italy during the century between 1876 to 1976, the U.S. was the largest single recipient of Italian immigrants in the world.

In 1850, less than 4,000 Italians were reportedly in the U.S. However in 1880, merely four years after the influx of Italian immigrants migrated, the population skyrocketed to 44,000, and by 1900, 484,027. From 1880 to 1900, southern Italian immigrants became the predominant Italian immigrant and stayed that way throughout the mass migration.

According to official records, the Greek sailor Don Teodoro or Theodoros, who sailed to America with the Spanish explorer Panfilio de Narvaez in 1528, was the first Greek to land in America. The names of other Greek sailors who may have come to America during this period are John Griego and Petros the Cretan.

One of the first Greek colonies was at New Smyrna near Saint Augustine, Florida. Andrew Turnball and his wife Maria Rubini, daughter of a wealthy Greek merchant, persuaded approximately 450 colonists to journey to America and settle.

The first wave of Greek immigrants included about 40 orphans who had survived the Greek Revolution of 1821 and who were brought to the United States by American missionaries; survivors of the 1822 massacre of Chios by the Turks; and merchant sailors who settled in the Americas. Most of these Greeks were from islands such as Chios, and others came from Asia Minor, Epirus, and Macedonia. By 1860 about 328 Greeks were living in the United States, with the majority residing in California, Arkansas, New York, and Massachusetts.

* Eastern European Immigration
In the 1880s a considerably increase in the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, mainly from Austria-Hungary, Italy, Greece, Poland, and Russia peaking with several years of over one million per year in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Immigration lessened during the World War I but increased again after the war.

* Arab World Immigration
There are reports that Arabs came to the Americas with the Spanish explorers in the 15th century.

Arab immigrants were a significant part of The Great Migration, the period in US history between 1880 and 1924 when more than 20 million immigrants entered the US. Most of these immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, but more than 95,000 Arabs came to the US from "Greater Syria" alone.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States.

* Asian Indian, Korean, and Southeast Asian Immigration
There were only about 700 Asian Indians in the United States before 1900 and fewer than 17,000 before 1965.

Between 1917 and 1946 almost all Asian Indian Immigration was barred. Most immigrants have arrived since 1965, though there have been Asian Indian-American Communities in California since the early part of the twentieth century.

The first immigration of Koreans to the North Americas happened in the early 1900's
near the year 1902. They came to America to work on the sugar plantations in Hawaii.
Later, the government restricted the limit of immigrants from Korea. During the Korean War many Korean orphans and war brides immigrated to America , approximately 20,000 people. Later when the Immigration and Nationality Act was created and signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 many Koreans entered the United States. Around 20,000 to 30,000 Koreans immigrated every year until 1988 when the Korean Immigration amount slowly declined.

By 1992, 147,460 Cambodians and 653,521 Vietnamese had arrived in the United States.[1] Forty-five percent of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees to America settled in California. The second largest population of Cambodians settled on the East Coast, in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York and Rhode Island. The Vietnamese's second largest place of settlement is in the Gulf states, in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida.[2] Many Vietnamese were fortunate enough to have come to the United States in the first two waves of Southeast Asian immigration in the 1970s. Most Cambodians, on the other hand, came in the 1980s as part of the third and most recent wave of Southeast Asian refugees, so they have not been here for as long as the Vietnamese.

* Mexican Immigration
Between 1821 and 1875, 75 different governments came to power in Mexico. Out of this political instability came Porfirio Diaz, who took power in 1876. Diaz was a dictator who did a terrible job of distributing the wealth within the country. In 1910, political opponents of Diaz overthrew him. Supporters of Diaz, the majority of the Mexican upper class, fled from Mexico and sought refuge in cities like San Antonio and El Paso. These Mexicans were accepted into white society because they were upper class, educated professionals. As the governments in Mexico continued to change, the U.S. became a sanctuary for overthrown political groups and their supporters.

* Caribbean Migration and Immigration
The stream of migrants to the United States was relatively small compared with the flow to Central America and Cuba.

While 108,000 people entered the United States from the entire Caribbean region between 1899 and 1932, it took only two islands, Jamaica and Barbados, to supply more than 240,000 laborers to Panama between 1881 and 1915.

The number of black people, especially those from the Caribbean, who migrated to the United States increased dramatically during the first three decades of the twentieth century, peaking in 1924 at 12,250 per year and falling off during the Depression. The foreign-born black population increased from 20,000 in 1900 to almost 100,000 by 1930.

Over 140,000 black immigrants passed through United States ports between 1899 and 1937, despite the restrictive immigration laws enacted in 1917, 1921, and 1924.