Italian and Chinese Immigration in the USA - A Comparison (PDF)

Essay from the year 2000 in the subject History - America, grade: 71=1,3, King`s College London (Department of History), course: American History 1877 to 1975, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Introduction
If one examines the vast bulk of literature on the subject of immigration it is astonishing that the term ‘assimilation’ appears with such regularity. The question when, how, and why immigrants actually became integrated into American society and culture, and what turned them into ‘Americans’ reveals its complexity if we consider the simple fact that between 1870 and 1910 the United States experienced the influx of more than 20 million immigrants. The ‘newcomers’, divided into a multitude of different ethnic, social, national, and religious groups were not simply abandoning the world they had left behind to become Americans nor did they assimilate to a static concept of ‘America’ which probably did not exist. In the way they adjusted to a new environment and developed distinctive patterns of defining their own identity they constantly modified and re-shaped the idea of America whose true essence was (and presumably still is) hard to define.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss and compare the experience of two immigrant groups between 1870 and 1914: the Chinese and the Italians. Soon it will become obvious that even these (national or ethnic) categories represent rather abstract generalizations of far more complex patterns.
The problem of identity and perception is crucial in examining the Chinese and Italian immigrant experience. How useful is it to refer to immigrants as ‘Italians’ or ‘Italian Americans’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘Chinese Americans’? How did they perceive themselves within the new environment and how did they come to be perceived by it? In which way did the experiences of both groups differ and how can we account for it? In order to emphasize the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese and Italian communities I shall try to stress differences rather that common features examining patterns of settlement, employment, the emergence and function of social, religious and economic institutions as well as the perception of the immigrants by ‘outsiders’. The nativist view on the immigrant communities is particularly important with regard to the Chinese as they were to become the first to be formally excluded from further immigration.
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