Immigrants entered America from continents such as Europe, Asia and Africa, with various reasons and factors for leaving their mother continents or countries. For instance, the Africans entered America as European slaves to work in their plantations. Europeans entered the new country as colonial masters and settlers, owning the plantations. For instance, the early Scottish immigration patterns in the 17th century were a result of the deportation of criminals and members of the society who had lost in ecclesiastical and civil disputes.
The European emigration patterns to America were evidenced by huge waves of immigrants since the late 1830s and early 1840s. The new American nation was coming to age around the 1840s, and this saw a discontent in Europe, which catalyzed great immigrant patterns from Germany and Ireland, which peaked around the 1850s, with America having new millions of citizens. The changing immigration patterns in the 1840s witnessed great numbers of European immigrants settle in the new American state, leading to great expansion, innovation as well as a modernized American society. During this period in time, the Europeans were migrating to seek security and escape the struggles of the post-Napoleonic era.
The changing patterns of immigration were witnessed by great numbers of Germans and the Irish, other than the British. The huge waves of Irish immigrants in the middle 19th century to the United States of America was as a result of hard and intolerable living conditions brought about by famine that had swept Ireland. They fled in great numbers, settling in Canada and the northeast parts of the United States.
The massive German emigration to the United States of America in the late 1840s and early 1850s was a result of fleeing the revolutions of 1848. There was a large Italian immigration wave to the United States in the 19th century. Prior to the 1850s, the Italian emigrant patterns were characterized by small groups, with a quarter of them being males. However, a larger emigrant wave of Italians (4 million) was witnessed from the early 1850s to 1920, whereby the mix in terms of gender, occupation and age had significantly changed.
The emigration patterns of Russians to the United States were not much different from those of Italians since the 1840s. From 1800 to 1940, there was a great remarkable change in the emigration patterns of Russian Jews to the United States of America. Statistics indicate that close to 2.5 Jews left Russia to settle in the United States. The major reasons for increased emigration from Europe were poverty and population pressures.
The rapid changes of immigration to the United States resulted in various domestic reactions. Due to the emigration upsurge in the 19th century, America was experiencing acute economic depression, which resulted in the provision of emigrant codes to restrict foreign labourers from competing with the natives in job seeking. Ethnic tension and conflicts between the natives and emigrants were also escalations.
By 1900, Italian emigrants were the majority in the USA and were assumed to be innate criminals, troublesome. These allegations, among others, led to the formation of the Dillingham Commission, providing a 42 volume report on a dictionary of races aimed to foster understanding of the racial elements in the US population through immigration. The above grievances also led to the imposition of the Immigration Act of 1921, whereby the quotas were not restrictive enough for immigration opponents, consequentially leading to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.