Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to the United States were in search of jobs. Many German immigrants were socialists fleeing political persecution, and Jewish immigrants were fleeing violent pogroms in Eastern Europe, but they all had to find work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly 60 percent of the US industrial workforce was foreign born, most being the nine million immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, as well as those continuing to emigrate from Ireland. Unlike the British, Irish, and German early settlers in the colonies or early United States, immigrants to the Industrial Revolution—mostly rural Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Jewish, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Greek—lacked skills suited for industry. For instance, in 1907, of the fourteen thousand common laborers at the US steel mills in Pittsburgh, nearly twelve thousand were Eastern Europeans. They worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, at low pay and made up the lower and poorly paid ranks of the urban sweatshops and the mills, factories, and mines. Except for the Jewish immigrants who had fled Jew-hating, violent pogroms in Russia and Poland, many of the immigrants had hopes of returning home. None had the mythical American Dream in mind. In 1908, more Austro-Hungarians and Italians left the US than arrived. Those immigrants working in the large cities were packed into crowded slums, making up nearly 60 percent of the population of cities with more than a hu...