Americans All, Immigrants All

Have you ever played with a magnet and a bunch of iron filings? Wasn’t it amazing to see the bits of iron leap across space to reach and cling to the magnet? This story is about a magnet much larger and more powerful than you have ever imagined—one 3,000 miles long and 1,500 miles wide. A different kind of magnet, too, one that attracted not iron filings, but human beings, real live people. A magnet that attracted every type and variety of human being alive! White people, black people, yellow people; Catholics, Protestants, Huguenots, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians, Jews; Spaniards, Danes, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Bohemians, Italians, Austrians, Slavs, Poles, Roumanians, Russians—and I’ve only just begun; farmers, miners, adventurers, soldiers, sailors, rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves, shoemakers, tailors, actors, musicians, ministers, engineers, writers, singers, ditch-diggers, manufacturers, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. That magnet was AMERICA.—From “We the People”—by Leo Huberman.

Ever since the dawn of history, man has been on the move, restlessly seeking new environments in an effort to satisfy his physical and other needs. In the main, his wanderings have been local in character, highlighted by occasional mass migrations which have had a marked effect upon the history of the world. Among such mass migrations may be cited the migration of the Israelites from Palestine to Egypt, of the Germanic tribes into the Roman Empire, of the Saxons and Danes to England, of the Moors from the north of Africa to Spain, and of the Mongols and the Tartars from the Orient to Central Asia.

Great as these migrations were and important as their effect was on the course of history, they did not compare with the stream of humanity that began to flow to this country early in the seventeenth century—a stream that assumed flood proportions toward the close of the nineteenth century.

Not only did the movement of peoples to our shores differ in magnitude from other migrations, it also differed in character. Whereas earlier mass migrations had consisted of the movements of tribes and distinct racial groups, the migration to the New World consisted of men of all races, nations, and creeds—a pageant of all the nations.