Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center
If last week’s news is any indication, residents of the richest countries on earth believe they are victims of globalization. And they see their best defense as further restrictions on migration.
By Donna R. Gabaccia, Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota
Americans have long associated immigration with the images that Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” affixed to the pedestal supporting the Statue of Liberty—images of the “tired” and of the “poor” and of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Historians now dispute whether the immigrants of the past were either tired or particularly poor. Most were working age people, full of energy, and in possession of sufficient cash to pay their own passages, as the truly poor of their times were not. Today, those images of huddled masses seem even less appropriate than they did a century ago.
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By Erika Lee, associate professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty
Ellis Island and Angel Island were both in the news in recent weeks. And the
stories about these two sites where immigrants from around the world were
admitted into the United States tell us a lot about which immigration
histories get remembered and celebrated and which ones do not.