Immigration, 19th century, US United States, Max Frisch, civil war, Abraham Lincoln, europe, culture, views, mass immigration, industrialization, borders, population, immigrants, citizenship
"We asked for workers. We got people instead". If this is the way Max Frisch has considered immigration in Europe in the early twentieth century, then rather as a burden than an opportunity, we need to observe that this comes as a completely different matter within the American vision, for which voluntary colonial settlements of the early 1600s and the following construction process of the United States, have forged a unique vision and status of it, all the more since after the 1861's greatest crisis Americans had ever faced within the Civil War which has split the country in two, it has, then, for long been encouraged as "appointed by Providence" to reshape the nation. President Lincoln's spoken words from the Homestead speech which mostly emphasized on encouraging and underlying the way emigrants were rooted, under brotherhood, to the American inner culture itself, make appear altogether, the crucial part played by the Civil War onto the American views.
[...] If prosperity and thrift have thus emerged as the new inner values of the United States, more pragmatic concerns such as paying off the national debt have appeared enforcing a new economic strategy as well as a new self-centred culture. A natural consequence of this brutal shift has probably been the Congress' enacting the Basic Naturalization Act in 1906, by Theodore Roosevelt, which officially aimed at "restoring dignity and uniformity to the naturalization process" while enforcing specific requirements from immigrants. [...]
[...] Migration in the United States from 1862 to the end of the 19th century Introduction "We asked for workers. We got people instead". If this is the way Max Frisch has considered immigration in Europe in the early twentieth century, then rather as a burden than an opportunity, we need to observe that this comes as a completely different matter within the American vision, for which voluntary colonial settlements of the early 1600s and the following construction process of the United States, have forged a unique vision and status of it, all the more since after the 1861's greatest crisis Americans had ever faced within the Civil War which has split the country in two, it has, then, for long been encouraged as "appointed by Providence" to reshape the nation. [...]
[...] The volunteer enrolment of millions of foreign-born persons, especially within the Northern army, shows how the national feeling and supportive ideas were progressing within many parts of the territory. In the same way, Joseph Brown, Georgia's governor forcibly recruited foreign nationals to support the war effort. Some experts have also supported the idea that it brought Northern army's "an incalculable advantage" (Doyle, 2019) and that no victory would have occurred without the help of this contingent who have mostly joined the war within some underlying patriotic motives, some as the recent documents extracted from the New York historical society, even reported spoken words like "friends of Liberty" and "Patriots of all nations" (Doyle, 2019) to illustrate at best this free enrolment process. [...]
[...] Nevertheless, these two visions, despite being quite opposed, have contributed to a specific and ambiguous status of legal immigration in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, opening to a more isolationist vision of the nation, which plays a key role in the way it is parting and, maybe, also, shaping the internal community divisions of today. Resources: ABRAMITSKY, Ran, BOUSTAN, Leah (2017). Immigration in American Economic History - PMC [HYPERLINK: https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJKiDrYWpjRSgA1RKPAwx.;_ylu=Y29sbwMEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1667945067/RO=10/RU=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fpmc%2Farticles%2FPMC5794227%2F/RK=2/RS=7uQTjLBWjh587fmcA1NNlq49TQ4-]. DOYLE, Don H (2019). The Civil War Was Won by Immigrant Soldiers. [...]
[...] VERBA, Sydney, PFORZHEIMER Carl H (2022). Aspiration, Acculturation, and Impact : Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 [HYPERLINK: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/]. Open Collections Program at Harvard University. TICHENOR, Daniel J. The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press p.224. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
