In the years after the Revolution many immigrants to the United States were political radicals, including John Doyle's father, who participated in the Irish Republican revolt against Great Britain in 1798 and later emigrated to Philadelphia. Like John Doyle, the author of this letter, many migrants brought craft skills and looked for work in the workshops and manufacturies of the new nation. When Doyle crossed the Atlantic in 1818 he quickly learned that small-scale entrepreneurship was more lucrative than sticking with his printing trade. Later immigration swelled as some two million Irish came to the United States between 1820 and 1860. The catastrophic Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49 sent hundreds of thousands (250,000 in 1851 alone) to disembark in cities where they faced economic hardships and ethnic discrimination.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Asian and Latino immigrants flocked to the United States, rivaling in sheer numbers the trans-Atlantic immigration of a century earlier. Many came because even minimum wage work in the United States paid five to ten times more than they could earn in their homelands. These Asian workers, photographed in 1991 as they labored in a garment shop in lower Manhattan, typified the work experience of many immigrants: monotonous, low wage work in conditions reminiscent of clothing industry sweatshops from earlier in the twentieth century.

This simulation game has students determine if individuals are eligible for legal U.S residence. In the game, travelers will enter Immigration Bay in boats and the student will have to process them and determine if they meet eligibility requirements or not.

Instructor Notes: Teachers can assign this content to their students in iCivics account and then Clicking the Assign button on this activity. Teachers will then have the option to add a Class into iCivics OR Sync a roster from Google Classroom. This will allow teachers to see student's responses. There are also Downloadable Resources available to support this learning activity.

By the mid-twentieth century, the movement of African Americans from farms to cities, along with their participation in World War II industries and union organizing, spawned the origins of the modern civil rights movement. Although conflict between white and black workers continued, many African Americans faced continued discrimination with a new sense of self-confidence and militancy, based on their identities as equal workers, soldiers, and citizens. This frame from Brotherhood of Man, an animated short produced by United Productions of America, a studio created by former Walt Disney animators, for the United Automobile Workers' 1946 interracial organizing drive.

Tensions among industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds often proved a barrier to unionization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, for example, a key factor in the defeat of the 1919 steel strike. In the 1930s, however, that began to change, particularly under the auspices of the CIO. In this 1974 interview done by historian Peter Gotlieb in 1974, Polish-American steelworker Joe Rudiak recalled how ethnic hostility declined in the "CIO days," particularly among the "young folks." This decrease in suspicion between people of different nationalities fostered unionization in the 1930s.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals in the early 20th century. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. In the fall of 1920 he joined the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. The case and execution were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. John Dos Passos's "They Are Dead Now-- - " appeared in the New Masses, October 1927. A stark poem that repudiated its own form as inadequate to the subject, it opened "This isn't a poem." In the poem, the executions ended the dreams not only of Sacco and Vanzetti, but those of many others who had followed the trials with disbelief and outrage.

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworker Joseph Fish described conditions in the steel mills as good and maintained that only "one or two" Americans have joined the strike.

Lord Baltimore established the colony of Maryland in the upper part of Chesapeake Bay in the early 1630s as a refuge for his fellow Catholics. Baltimore's plans for a feudal system with labor performed by tenant farmers, along with many of the colonists' other high expectations, proved impossible to establish. The tobacco boom and offers of free land to Protestant and Catholic alike drew thousands of English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland. Over three quarters of the migrants to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake arrived as indentured servants, financing their passage by signing indentures, or contracts, for four to seven years labor. Most had agricultural backgrounds and were also fleeing poverty and unemployment in England. George Alsop was one such indentured servant, probably with experience as an artisan or mechanic. He offered an account that boasted of the favorable situation for servants, especially women, to counter other writers who compared conditions in the Chesapeake to slavery.

Early nineteenth-century cities experienced enormous growth. New York's population tripled after 1810, numbering over 312,000 by 1840. As the population exploded, the gap between rich and poor also deepened. Writing in a British periodical in 1845, "A Working Man" described changes in the urban workplace and also in residential and leisure patterns. Recounting his family's emigration to America in 1825-35, he emphasized emigrants' enormously high expectations and frequently ensuing disappointments. While work was plentiful, the pace was brutal and hours long. With its congested thoroughfares and colorful vistas, the city made a vivid impression upon residents and visitors alike. While residents could boast of an abundance of fruit and other items in the markets, the city's unstructured growth also resulted in rampant disease and filthy streets. "A Working Man" was struck by the city's youthful population, but also by the low esteem reserved for old age.

After their arrival, the Puritan migrants to Massachusetts Bay quickly dispersed into a series of settlements around Boston and then moved inland. Colonists formed clustered towns where they could secure land for their families and churches for their worship. One such community was Concord, Massachusetts, founded by Simon Willard, a fur trader with the local Indians. In his history of New England, entitled The Wonder-Working Providence, woodworker and local historian Edward Johnson recorded an account "of the manner how they placed downe their dwellings in this Desart Wildernesse." Johnson emphasized the providential (God-given) nature of the Puritan mission, one that saw the eastern woodlands, a region that the English and Indians shared in the first decades of settlement, as a wilderness.

In the following interview, Pete Tijerina, the first executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discussed the origins of the organization. A trial lawyer with experience handling discrimination cases and encouraging organized political participation among Mexican Americans, Tijerina had been a State Civil Rights Chairman for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), an organization he joined in 1946. Because his efforts with LULAC were limited by funding and the demand for aid to individuals in localized cases, Tijerina and others realized the need for broad legal precedents to successfully erase widespread discriminatory practices and implement social and economic changes. MALDEF, with a $2.2 million grant in 1968 from the Ford Foundation (including $250,000 for the education of Mexican American lawyers), was set up initially in five southwestern states. It was patterned after the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), formed in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall to pursue initiatives in the courts to gain opportunities long denied to African Americans. MALDEF successfully argued in court for inclusion of Mexican Americans on Texas juries, integration of schools, bilingual and bicultural educational programs, equal opportunity in employment, and amendments to the Voting Rights Act.

Free labor provided possibilities for emancipation for some enslaved people. The most industrious and the most skilled of the enslaved could take greater advantage of these opportunities. Venture Smith had been born in the 1720s, the son of a West African prince who named him Broteer Furro. Slave traders captured him at the age of six, spirited him away to the coast, and transported him to a life of enslavement in Long Island and eastern Connecticut. After several changes of ownership, he was able to purchase his freedom by his labors at the age of 31. Those labors, along with his entrepreneurial activities such as fishing, working on a whaler, and agricultural activities, made possible the purchase of his son, daughter, and wife's liberty. Near the end of the 18th century he related his life history to Elisha Niles, a schoolteacher and Revolutionary war veteran. Published in 1798, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself recounted his successful negotiation of the slavery economy and recognition of free labor as the key to a free identity.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. This 1938 article in the Chinese Vanguard reported on the CHLA's anti-Japanese work and efforts to mobilize support for China.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. The CHLA's flyers, which were enclosed in clean laundry packages, detailed Japanese aggression and called on Americans to urge their government to sanction Japan and support China. This 1938 editorial in the Chinese Vanguard praised their organizational energy.

Even in the late nineteenth-century American West, a notably violent region, the violence directed against Chinese immigrants was shocking. The Union Pacific railroad employed 331 Chinese and 150 whites in their coal mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, Chinese and white miners, who were paid by the ton, had a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly desirable area of the mine. White miners, members of the Knights of Labor, beat two Chinese miners and walked off their jobs. That evening the white miners, armed with rifles, rioted and burned down the Chinese quarter. No whites were prosecuted for the murder of twenty-eight Chinese and $150,000 in property damage, even though the identities of those responsible were widely known. Although U.S. Army troops had to provide protection before some of the Chinese could finally return to their burned-out homes in Rock Springs, some defiantly continued to work in the Union Pacific mines into the next century. The grim story of the riot was given in the Chinese workers' own words in this "memorial" that they presented to the Chinese Consul at New York.

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality's presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. While it passed with only six dissenting votes, congressional debates over the Johnson-Reed Act revealed arguments on both sides of this question of American policy and national identity. For example, on April 8, 1924, Robert H. Clancy, a Republican congressman from Detroit with a large immigrant constituency, defended the "Americanism" of Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants and attacked the quota provisions of the bill as racially discriminatory and "un-American."

In this lesson, students will explore the history and experiences of Sikhs in the UnitedStates. Through media and historical archives, students will study how the communityhas been impacted by anti-Sikh hate incidents from the early 1900s to the present day.More importantly, however, students will analyze how the Sikh community responded tothese incidents.

Although by 1919 radical and labor movements had been seriously weakened by the government's repression and persecution during World War I, loyalty" organizations and the U.S. Department of Justice used fears spawned by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to prosecute a crusade against radicals

This undocumented worker was left without work when the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001. The hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who staff low paying jobs in the service industries are often invisible, despite their important contributions to the nation's economy. Largely unprotected by labor laws and ineligible for social security and unemployment insurance, these immigrants struggle to support themselves as well as, in many cases, family and relatives in their countries of origin. Their suffering in the wake of the World Trade Center attack was similarly invisible, although the tragedy hit the undocumented workers who worked in the center particularly hard. Undocumented workers could not gain government-sponsored economic assistance or other forms of relief available to citizens who lost work.

During the 1840s and 1850s, anti-immigrant feelings grew amongst many native born whites. These nativists" argued that immigrants caused many of the nation's ills by rejecting "American" work habits