Quelle: http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2008/February/20080307112004ebyessedo0.1716272.html
“13 February 2008

About 16 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island in New York from 1892 to 1924. (© AP Images)

Immigration and U.S. History By Hasia Diner
Hasia Diner is professor of history at New York University in New York City.

Tens of millions of immigrants over four centuries have made the United States what it is today. They came to make new lives and livelihoods in the New World; their hard work benefited themselves and their new home country.

Millions of women and men from around the world have decided to immigrate to the United States. That fact constitutes one of the central elements in the country’s overall development, involving a process fundamental to its pre-national origins, its emergence as a new and independent nation, and its subsequent rise from being an Atlantic outpost to a world power, particularly in terms of its economic growth. Immigration has made the United States of America.

Like many other settler societies, the United States, before it achieved independence and afterward, relied on the flow of newcomers from abroad to people its relatively open and unsettled lands. It shared this historical reality with Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, among other nations.

In all of these cases the imperial powers that claimed these places had access to two of the three elements essential to fulfilling their goal of extracting natural resources from the colony. They had land and capital but lacked people to do the farming, lumbering, mining, hunting, and the like. Colonial administrators tried to use native labor, with greater or lesser success, and they abetted the escalation of the African slave trade, bringing millions of migrants, against their will, to these New World outposts.

Immigration, however, played a key role not only in making America’s development possible but also in shaping the basic nature of the society. Its history falls into five distinct time periods, each of which involved varying rates of migration from distinctly different places in the world. Each reflected, and also shaped, much about the basic nature of American society and economy”(…)

Quelle: http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2008/February/20080307112004ebyessedo0.1716272.html