EDUCATION OF IMMIGRANT STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES

Education of Immigrant Students in United States

Education of Immigrant Students in United States

The United States is often called a "nation of immigrants"; more accurately the nation always comprised both newcomers and those who worry about the impact of the newcomers on the existing society. The relationship between newcomers and established families has always been in some sense filled with tensions, uncertainties, and even bitter conflicts. It has also been characterized by varied efforts at accommodation and adaptation, often but not always on the part of the newcomers alone.

Immigration to the United States

Between 1820 and 1996, 63 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Germans were cumulatively the largest group, with 7.1 million, followed by Mexicans, with 5.5 million (60 percent of the Mexican immigrants over the 176-year period had arrived in the last 15 years). Other groups of immigrants, in order, were from Italy (5.4 million), the United Kingdom (5.2 million), Ireland (4.8 million), Canada (4.4 million, however, many Irish immigrants came via Canada), and Russia (which used to include much of Poland and the Baltic states-3.8 million).

Immigrants who arrived before the 1840s were for the most part similar to the native population, if not superior in education and ambition; they were rarely considered a problem by the native-born population. With the arrival of large numbers of Irish and German Catholics in the two decades before the Civil War, however, immigrants began to be seen as a threat to American society. The number of immigrants tripled between the 1830s and the 1840s, and the country received as many immigrants in the 1850s as in the two previous decades combined. Between 1845 and 1854 immigration increased the American population by 17.6 percent, a much higher rate than in the latter half of the twentieth century.

After many decades of essentially unrestricted admission, the United States imposed restrictions in 1882 excluding criminals, prostitutes, and the physically and mentally ill. "Nine years later the category of excluded undesirables was extended to take in as well believers in anarchism and in polygamy. These minimal controls reflected no disposition to check the total volume of immigration" (Handlin, p. 287).

Late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, widely considered to come from "inferior stock," were restricted, though much needed by an expanding economy. In the wave of xenophobia that swept over the United States during World War I, a literacy requirement was imposed in 1917. The phase of qualitative restrictions ended with the National Origins Act of 1924, which placed strict quantitative restrictions on the number of immigrants allowed from various nations, explicitly designed to limit immigration from countries that were considered less desirable sources of future citizens.

Puerto Ricans, as United States citizens, enjoyed an unrestricted right to migrate in search of better economic conditions. With the introduction of air service between San Juan and New York City after World War II, the United States experienced what was surely the world's first ...