A History of the First Wave of Mass Immigration

On April 17, 1907, Ellis Island processed 11,700 immigrants, the busiest single day in the station's history and more people in one day than lived in most American towns at the time.

That day was not an anomaly. In 1907 alone, 1.29 million immigrants entered the United States, and the foreign-born share of the population stood at 14.7%.^[1][2] Wages for unskilled workers had been flat for fifteen years, and tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side packed 334,000 people into a single square mile.^[9]

The surge ran on like this for decades. Congress did not act to end it until 1924, forty-three years after the wave began, when it passed the Immigration Act that cut annual admissions by about 80%.

The Scale of the First Wave

The 1900s were the highest-immigration decade in American history. 8.8 million immigrants arrived in ten years. The total from 1880 to 1924: approximately 26 million.

The foreign-born share peaked at 14.8% in 1890. It dipped during the depression of the 1890s and climbed back to 14.7% by 1910.^[2]

Why It Happened

In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Pogroms against Jews followed immediately. The May Laws of 1882 restricted where Jews could live and work. Major pogroms struck Kishinev in 1903 and spread across the Pale of Settlement through 1906. Roughly 2 million Jews left the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920.

Russian and Polish peasants faced their own crisis. The emancipation of serfs in 1861 had created a landless class with no economic future. Military conscription lasted 25 years. Young men left.

In Southern Italy, unification in 1861 had concentrated industrial development in the north. The Mezzogiorno was left behind. Peasants worked land they did not own. Agricultural crises, citrus disease, and cholera epidemics in Naples compounded the poverty. Over 4 million Italians came to America between 1880 and 1924.^[1]

Austria-Hungary sent Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Poles. Farmland had been subdivided across generations until individual plots could no longer sustain a family.

Carnegie Steel needed workers. So did Standard Oil, the meatpacking plants in Chicago, the railroads, and the textile mills. American industrialization had an enormous appetite for unskilled labor.

Steamship technology cut the Atlantic crossing to roughly 10 days. Steerage tickets cost $25 to $30 - about $800 to $1,000 in today's money. Steamship companies sent agents to recruit in European villages. By 1900, roughly 40% of immigrants had their passage paid by relatives already in the United States. Chain migration was the engine of the first wave.

In the 1880s, nearly three-quarters of arrivals came from Northern and Western Europe. By 1907, Southern and Eastern Europeans made up roughly 80%. Italy alone sent over 285,000 that year. The new immigrants were Catholic and Jewish rather than Protestant, and spoke languages other than English. Additionally, they arrived from societies different than the likes of England and Scotland.

What Mass Immigration Cost America

The Dillingham Commission - a bipartisan committee of Congress - studied the question of wage from 1907 to 1911. Its findings filled 41 volumes, arguing that immigrant labor depressed wages in mining, textiles, meatpacking, and construction.

In Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mines, the arrival of Slavic and Italian workers undercut earlier Welsh, Irish, and English miners. Economist Claudia Goldin's research quantified the effect: the 1880-1924 immigration wave reduced real wages for native workers by roughly 1% to 1.5% for each 1% increase in the labor force from immigration.^[8]

Real wages for unskilled labor stayed flat from 1890 to 1915. The economy grew enormously during those years. The gains went to capital owners, not workers. Employers hired different nationalities who could not communicate with each other. This made strikes harder to coordinate. Ethnic diversity was a deliberate tool against labor organizing.

New York's Lower East Side became one of the most densely populated places on earth. The 10th Ward reached a density of roughly 334,000 people per square mile by 1900. Jacob Riis documented what that looked like in "How the Other Half Lives" (1890): families of six to eight in single rooms, no ventilation, shared privies, rampant disease.

The Tenement House Act of 1901 was passed in direct response. Chicago, Boston, and Pittsburgh faced the same overcrowding.

The American Protective Association organized against Catholic immigrants in 1887. Anti-Italian sentiment ran deep. In 1891, a mob in New Orleans lynched 11 Italians - the largest mass lynching in American history.

Language barriers were severe. Entire neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and Boston operated in Italian, Yiddish, Polish, or Greek. English was unnecessary.

Tammany Hall in New York organized immigrant communities by offering services - housing, jobs, help navigating the bureaucracy - in exchange for votes. Immigrant communities were politically mobilized before they were culturally assimilated.

How Congress Responded - Eventually

The Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1894. The Johnson-Reed Act passed in 1924. Thirty years separated organized advocacy from effective legislation. From the first year annual immigration exceeded 500,000 in 1881 to the 1924 Act: 43 years.

Three presidents vetoed restriction bills: Cleveland in 1897, Taft in 1913, and Wilson in 1915. While the Dillingham Commission published its 41-volume recommendation in 1911, their recommendation took 13 years to become law.

Business lobbying, presidential vetoes, and political calculation blocked action for decades. Congress restricted immigration in stages: the 1917 literacy test, the 1921 emergency quota, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Wages for unskilled workers did not begin their four-decade climb until after the 1924 Act took effect.

The Result

The 1924 Act cut annual immigration from roughly 900,000 to approximately 164,000 under the quota system. Including non-quota Western Hemisphere immigration, total admissions fell to roughly 300,000 per year in the late 1920s. During the Depression, fewer than 100,000 arrived per year.

The foreign-born share dropped steadily. It fell from 14.7% in 1910 to 11.6% in 1930 to 6.9% in 1950 to 4.7% in 1970 - the lowest in American history.^[2]

Wages for unskilled workers rose for four straight decades. Homeownership increased by 20 percentage points.^[3] Union membership reached roughly 35% of the workforce. The middle class expanded to its largest share of the population in American history.

The immigrants already in the country assimilated completely. By the 1950s, the children of Italian, Polish, Jewish, and Greek immigrants had become simply American. The 1924-to-1965 pause gave them time to learn English, intermarry, and move into the middle class.

The Parallel to Today

The first wave ended because Congress acted. Three presidents vetoed restriction bills. Congress eventually overrode them. The Dillingham Commission studied the problem for four years and published 41 volumes of data. The 1924 Act was the product of decades of debate and research.

Today's foreign-born share stands at 15.8%, above the first wave's 14.7% peak, and annual immigration runs higher now than it did then. The economic consequences track the first wave closely: wage stagnation, unaffordable housing, parallel communities.

Congress acted in the first wave and has not in the second. The RAISE Act, introduced by Senators Cotton and Perdue in February 2017 and reintroduced in 2019, would have cut legal immigration roughly in half; it never reached a floor vote in either Congress.^[10] The Immigration Act of 1990 is still the governing law 35 years on, and the travel bans, visa freezes and fee increases layered on top of it end whenever the next president decides they do.

What worked in 1924 is available now: comprehensive legislation that reduces immigration by at least 80% and gives the country time to assimilate the immigrants already here.

Recommendations

The 1924 Act held for four decades because it was permanent law. Durable reform has to be legislated.

• Pass a modern Johnson-Reed Act by cutting admissions by ~80%, from the current 1+ million to about 200,000 a year, the same proportional cut the 1924 Act made when it dropped admissions from roughly 900,000 to about 178,000.
• Hold the lower numbers long enough for assimilation, backed by an advanced English-proficiency and civics requirement for citizenship.
• Narrow family migration to spouses and minor children.

Sources

1. DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Table 1: Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status, 1820-2019
2. Census Bureau, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population, 1850-2000
3. U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Series C 88-114
4. Library of Congress, Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act)
5. Library of Congress, Immigration Act of 1917
6. Dillingham Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission (41 volumes, 1911)
7. National Park Service, Ellis Island History
8. Goldin, Claudia, "The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921," in The Regulated Economy, University of Chicago Press, 1994
9. Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives, 1890
10. RAISE Act, S. 354, 115th Congress (2017) - Cotton-Perdue bill to cut legal immigration roughly in half; referred to committee and never reported out