Faces of America: A Historical Perspective (Pic heavy: dial up warning)

[RagingInMiami]

Harriet Tubman with escaped slaves in an undated 19th century photo.



Irish immigrant workers who were digging up the Erie Canal in an undated 19th century photo.


Chinese railroad workers in California in 1867.


German-Americans making the move west in 1870


Irish coal miners in the 1880s.



Chinese-American men 1890-1910



European immigrants pulling into New York Harbor at turn of the century.



Black school children in Chicago in 1904.


Jewish peddler in New York in 1900.


Irish immigrants arriving in the United States in 1902.


Polish neighborhood in Chicago in 1903.



Italians arriving in the United States through Ellis Island in 1910



Homeless Italian earthquake refugees on their way to America.


Italian immigrants arriving in Ellis Island


Italian immigrants - view from Ellis Island


Norweigan Day celebration in Chicago 1915


Russian immigrant family in 1918.


1937 migratory Mexican field worker's home on the
edge of a frozen pea field. Imperial Valley, California


Mexicans arriving in the United States through El Paso in 1938


Mexican migrant workers at a Farm Security Administration camp,
which had been set up specifically to protect Mexican migrant workers from violent attacks.


Jewish refugee children in 1939.


Mexican wearing Zoot Suit in 1943.


American sailors who terrorized Mexicans during the "Zoot Suit riots" in Los Angeles in 1943.


Chinese children in Chicago in 1929.



A Japanese-American child who is being evacuated with his parents to a detention camp in California during World War II>


Japanese-owned store forced to close down in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles
during World War II because its owner was forced into a detention camp.


Puerto Ricans registering to vote in New York in 1960.



Cuban refugees awaiting processing in Miami in 1962.


Cubans arriving in Key West in 1965



Puerto Ricans in civil rights demonstration in 1967.


Twelve Cubans sailing to South Florida on a 1951 Chevy turned float in 2003


Haitians arriving in South Florida.


New Americans in Brooklyn in May 2004, from left front, guang zhou, from China;
Rahima Khatun, from Bangladesh; and Mario Leonardo Arzu, from Guatemala.


Where we're at now.

[Kutjara]

1. A powerful argument in pictures. Thanks! (n/t)

[lisby]

2. Bravo

:applause:


Lisby

[BrightKnight]

3. interesting immigration numbers

Decade, Immigrant Flow (000s), Percentage of Population that is Foreign-born


1880s 5246.6 14.7

1890s 3687.6 13.6

1900s 8795.4 14.6

1910s 5735.8 13.2

1920s 4107.2 11.6

1930s 528.4 8.8

1940s 1035 6.9

1950s 2515.5 5.4

1960s 3321.7 4.7

1970s 4493.3 6.2

1980s 7338.1 7.9

-------------------------------
This article contains some interesting statistics.

http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~economic/econ104/immigrat/

[nonconformist]

6. Good article, thanks. nt

[silverojo]

4. All the other immigrants came here LEGALLY!!!!!!!!

What does it take to make people understand there's a difference between coming here legally and illegally?!?!?

Cry me a river for the criminal getting busted in that last picture.

One major problem is that the illegals are bringing back diseases our modern society thought were dead. They're also bankrupting hospitals because they just waltz into ER's instead of going to doctors for simple problems.

My post (with lengthy quotes from medical authorities) on the subject is here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2563804

[MADem]

9. Well, legally was a different thing, back in the day

All you needed was a letter from a relative saying that they'd support you (they didn't actually have to do it, they just had to say it) and they checked you over when the boat landed to make sure you didn't look too sick. Off ye go!

If the nation was truly serious about illegal immigration, they'd make it a mandatory 5-10 year prison term and fine to $100K for anyone HIRING them. And they'd give cops a bonus for every person convicted. Trust me, that would solve the problem in a heartbeat. You wouldn't even need a border patrol--who'd bother coming, if there was no work?

Big business and the idle rich held the door open, for years. The Mexican and Central Americans were INVITED in, in a tacit way. Now that the economy is in the toilet, they want the poor US native folks to get their asses off unemployment and into the fields or pushing that broom or making those beds.

[noamnety]

10. interesting question

What does it take to make people understand there's a difference between coming here legally and illegally?

My guess is it's a matter of convincing people to look at it solely from the point of view of the privileged. You would have to remove any empathy or understanding for why people come here in the first place. You would have to convince them that people born into third-world poverty deserve to remain there, and you'd have to be able to justify believing that they are coming here specifically to screw you over, not because they're desperately trying to find a better life for themselves or their families, or that you wouldn't do the same, given the same set of circumstances. You'd also have to convince people that illegal immigrants are a source of disease - diseases that are acceptable in "those other" countries, but not here, not in America. And you'd have to blame them for not being able to afford preventative health care, and convince us to be angry when their untreated medical problems mushroom into a crisis.

[Lochloosa]

12. Well argued lwfern.

I await their reply.

[hippywife]

13. All I have to say is

best post ever on this subject. It's called humanity. Some people have none. Thank you for sharing yours. :loveya:

[katinmn]

15. Oh balderdash. All the other immigrants didn't come here legally

That is a crock. We've had several amnesty programs throughout our history, most recently in the 1980s.

And sick illegals don't "waltz" into ERs. Most try to stay under the radar. Illegals are not the cause of our broken health care system.

Don't blame illegal immigrants. Blame YOUR government for the problem. They have been serving corporations who want slave labor. We could have a just immigration policy any time. It just doesn't work for business.

[RagingInMiami]

17. Stop being such a hypocrite

You know just as well as I do that if tomorrow all the Mexicans who are in this country were suddenly turned citizens, making them LEGAL, you would still be bitching.

[wookie294]

5. Great photos

Those photos made me think of my Irish great grandmother who came over on the boat in 1900. I got meet her when I was 8 years old back in the 1970s. Kinda cool. I sympathize with Mexican immigrants today (legal and illegal) and have no problem with the Spanish culture here in Los Angeles. They are great people!

[malaise]

7. Beautiful

Any photos of English-speaking West Indians from the early 1900s? Quite a large number went to Howard U and Tuskegee then to New York.

Edit -sp.

[RagingInMiami]

18. If you find them, feel free to post them here

I didn't look for any because it was getting late when I finally posted this.

[malaise]

23. I'll ask some of the cousins

Thanks for that lovely post.

[RagingInMiami]

24. "Negroes from the West Indies"

Arriving in Ellis Island in the early 1900s.

[izzie]

8. Great and in college I had to read and know the history if it all

Who came, why they came and how they made out. Since my own family were just about 100 percent pre-USA I was really interested in the subject. Half my children's family came from the great German and Irish group. I did special studies on it and one study we found that the newer the person to this country the more history he knew about the country. My college teacher was from Iran via England Univ. and he used to have a fit because so many students did not know a thing about US history. He was a great teacher and I used to sit around in a garden and have lunch with him and we just used to talk about what he had done and my very nice easy time growing up.

[IndyOp]

11. It is never simple...

If anyone thinks that the tired and hungry people who washed up on US shores were able to do well in the US so long as they had no interference from the 'locals' -- you are wrong. Read "Angelas Ashes" and "Tis" -- Frank McCourt's autobiographies. During periods when too many immigrants entered the US jobs were scarce and they did *not* do better than they had in the old place. McCourt's family suffered terribly and eventually returned to the slums of Ireland where they had been better off.

I *do* believe in immigration and believe we should increase rates of legal immigration for political refugees, especially.

I do believe that we should crack down on businesses that illegally hire illegal immigrants and raise the minimum wage for all legal workers. Millions of Mexicans would return home on their own. No purges. No wall. No racism. Humane treatment for all.

Please tune in to Thom Hartmann -- he is the only person I have heard who really understands all of the issues, and difficult choices, involved.

- The show plays 24/7 - link to stream it is in the first paragraph.

[Hutzpa]

14. Finally......the truth can be seen

nothing more powerful than these photos being seen by everyone, people have forgotten where they came from, so its easy to say I'm a 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation....but it still does not warrant all this outrage which IMHO is based on selfishness.

Typical Human Beings with short memory.


Thanks RagingInMaimi for this Reminiscence with our conscience!

[katinmn]

16. Nice! May I add one more?

Home Swede Home
Swedish immigrants in Kansas

[RagingInMiami]

21. Great photo

Do you know what year it was taken in?

[katinmn]

22. oops. no. But I can make an educated guess that it was in the 1880s

We had one of the largest waves of immigrants from Sweden,Germany and Norway then.

Looking at that picture, you have to wonder how bad it was back home. People came for so many different reasons but the biggest one was survival. With a lack of land for farming, people were literally starving.

I remember reading that 180,000 Swedes came to Minnesota in a single year. Have you heard of an author named Vilhelm Moberg? He wrote a series of historical novels about the mass Swedish immigration to America.

Between the mid-1840s and 1930 1.3 million Swedes came to America!
http://www.americanwest.com/swedemigr/pages/emigra.htm

There are many other examples of mass emigration. That's what America is all about. :)

It's interesting reading about assimilation. Those that were already here always looked down their noses at the newest arrivals. In some old documents I read that there was a saying that you could smell a Swede coming before you could see him. Nasty stuff. And this was probably from a group that had arrived a decade earlier.

[The Stranger]

19. Don't forget these!

[PDittie]

20. Moving. Powerful.

In 1962 my wife, in the arms of her mother and father, excaped from Cuba by plane to New York. They left behind everything -- a beautiful home, clothes, money and other assets -- fleeing the the takeover by Fidel Castro with nothing but the clothes they wore and a few clean diapers for thei two-year-old daughter.

They may be somewhere in that photo above, or not, but most certainly many they knew are.

The people who wish to criminalize immigration are lousy sturdents of history (among their many other glaring faults).

[RagingInMiami]

25. .