During the period from 1880 to 1920, millions of people in a huge wave
of immigration came to the United States from southern and eastern
Europe, including Italy and Greece. An estimated four million Italian
immigrants arrived in the United States, making Italians the single
largest European national group to move to America in that era. Great
numbers of young Greek men were also part of this immigration wave.
In fact, by 1925 one out of every four Greek men between the ages of
fifteen and forty-five had gone to the United States.
Italian immigration
Italy experienced political turmoil and economic crisis at the end of the
nineteenth century. Finding it difficult to support their families, many
Italians decided to emigrate. Two of Italy’s poorest regions, the island of
Sicily and the region around Naples, accounted for over half the Italians
who left their homes for the United States.
The United States attracted many Italians because it desperately
needed workers. The American Civil War (1861–65) had killed over six
hundred thousand young men, creating a labor shortage just when the
country was building its major cross-country railroads and establishing
factories and industrial centers. Young Italian men sought steady wages
they could send home to their families. They left their homeland planning to return to Italy when economic circumstances improved. In fact,
many Italians did return home after working in the United States for a
short period.
Life for Italian Americans
Italian immigrants were among the poorest people to come to the United
States in this period. They tended to take work as laborers in the cities of
the northeastern United States, especially New York City and Boston,
Massachusetts. Most immigrants from southern Italy could not read or
write, and few spoke English. Thus, they were often forced to work in
the lowest-paying jobs that no one else wanted.
Newly arrived Italian men used an employment system that revolved
around a padrone, which means “boss.” The padrone acted as a professional labor broker. Employers came to him to find workers, and job
seekers came to him to find work. The padrone system contributed to a concentration of Italian workers in certain industries such as construction, where the padrones had contacts.
When they arrived in the United States, it was common for Italian
Americans to move into a neighborhood where people from their own
town or region of Italy had settled. Several families from the same Italian
town often lived next to each other on the same street in Boston or New
York, maintaining the same social ties they had in Italy. As these neighborhoods grew, they each became known as Little Italy.
Sometime around World War I (1914–18), prejudice against
Italians became strong. Non-Italian Americans resented that the Italian Americans retained their language and culture and lived in tight-knit
groups. They were suspicious of their Catholic religion, and they looked
down upon the poorer Italians who were forced to take low-paying jobs.
Hostility against Italians began to decline in the 1930s.
Greek immigrants
The first Greek immigrants were farmers who suffered from poverty in
an unstable Greek economy in the late nineteenth century. Most who decided to emigrate were uneducated, and many wished to come only long
enough to earn money to send to their families.
Like the Italians, the Greek immigrants had a padrone system. Greek
padrones, though, recruited workers directly from Greece to come to the
United States under contract. As with the indentured servitude system
of earlier times, the employers would pay for the workers’ passage to
America. In return, the worker would agree to work for a number of
years at an agreed-upon (but always very low) wage. Many Greek families who could not otherwise make ends meet sent their sons to the
United States under such contracts. Young men and boys under the
padrone system often worked as shoe shine boys or as helpers to shopkeepers.
Between 1900 and 1920, about 350,000 Greek immigrants arrived
in the United States. The majority tended to settle in the cities of the
Northeast and Midwest, such as Boston, New York, and Chicago,
Illinois. Many Greek immigrants eventually opened their own businesses. Once a Greek man had established a business in the United
States, he often sent for a wife from his home village through an arranged
marriage; the chosen woman would then immigrate to the United States.
Greek Americans suffered discrimination at first, and at times it was
violent. But on the whole, they were treated somewhat better than the
Italians and other southern Europeans arriving at the time.
Immigration Act of 1924
By the 1920s, prejudices against newly arrived immigrants resulted in
anti-immigrant policies in the United States. Congress passed the
Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which restricted the number of immigrants who could come into the United States based on people’s nationality. Three years later, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, making national quotas permanent. It radically reduced the maximum
number of immigrants from any single country to a number equal to 2
percent of the number of that particular nationality that had resided in
the United States in 1890—before the many Italians and Greeks had arrived.
The intent of the law was to preserve the United States as a country
dominated by people with northern European, Protestant ancestors. The
result of the law was to end forty years of mass migration from southern and eastern Europe.