A popular pastime is to take selected bits of information about a subject and present them with great flourish to convince others of a particular point. Bothersome co-workers, self-serving politicians, Fox News anchors and drunken people in bars do it all the time. So in that vein, here are a slew of interesting handpicked facts related to immigration to the United States.
For starters
Architectural evidence indicates at some point from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, groups of Asians in what is now northeastern Russia crossed a land bridge called Beringia into North America. They continued southward and eventually populated both North and South America, al though historians and archaeologists still debate the particulars of who went where first. Some scholars have even claimed one of the Lost Tribes of Israel was involved in settling this continent.
Vikings tried to immigrate here. Beginning in the 10th century, Norse settlers moved onto Greenland and stayed for 500 years. Expeditionary settlements in North America did not last. Some researchers claim to have found evidence of Viking presence in New England from Maine to Rhode Island.
Then came the English. In 1585, not too long after the last Norse settlers left Greenland, Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Walter Raleigh to find a spot for a permanent English settlement in North America. Attempts to establish a settlement on Roanoke Island failed, and no one knows for sure what happened. The modest settlement was neatly dismantled, and speculation was the settlers might have mixed themselves in with nearby Native Americans, thereby becoming the first permanent European immigrants. Another group followed to establish the Jamestown settlement in 1607. They grew tobacco, a popular export, and their colony survived.
Another batch of immigrants from England – 102 passengers and a crew of 30 – landed in 1620 in Massachusetts. These were the Pilgrims led by Captain John Smith, and their settlement also made it. Others followed shortly thereafter, and the land rush from Europeans was on. Tens of thousands of Puritans from England immigrated to New England coastal areas. Dutch and German immigrants settled from New York to the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were joined by Quaker immigrants. Scottish Presbyterians headed for the unsettled western frontier, and Spanish newcomers established forts in Florida.
Immigrants from Ireland came by the thousands, and one estimate claimed that in some areas, nine out of ten indentured servants were from Ireland. French explorers traveled up the Mississippi River as well as down from the Great Lakes area.
In 1731, far to the west in what has become Texas, Spain was the power, and 15 families from the Canary Islands settled near a presidio on a river. By August these immigrants had established a town site now known as San Antonio, the first permanent settlement in Texas.
Spain also sent many settlers up from Mexico to establish a presence in California. Russian fur traders also built forts on the Pacific coast as far south as Sonoma County, just north of San Francisco.
Immigrants from Africa were kidnapped and hauled across the Atlantic as slaves to work the farms in the Atlantic coastal colonies beginning with the Jamestown colony, and eventually throughout the South. Many Asians began arriving during the early 19th century to work in California, particularly as part of the mid-century Gold Rush. They made quite a splash when they arrived in the small northern California town of Yreka and other gold prospecting sites. Immigrants from China also took on the lion’s share of heavy manual labor during construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the late 1860s.
Particular immigrants
- John Washington immigrated to Virginia from England in 1656. He was a successful landowner who used African immigrants to work his properties. He had two sons, one of whom was Augustine, a tobacco farmer and manufacturer. His son, George, became a successful surveyor and military man who later led American troops to victory in the Revolutionary War and – the grandson of an immigrant – became the first President of the United States. Every school kid learns Washington once stated, “I cannot tell a lie.”
- Benjamin Franklin, born January 17, 1706, was one of the premier polymaths of his time. His father and all four grandparents were immigrants.
- Levi Strauss was born in Bavaria in 1829 and immigrated to the United States in 1837. He moved to San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush and established a dry goods business. He made tents for gold miners, and with one of his customers, patented those denim jeans we cannot live without.
- Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland in 1847. He moved to Canada in 1870, then to Boston in 1872 where, besides continuing his experiments with sending and receiving intelligible voices through a telegraph wire, he taught those who were deaf or hard of hearing. Helen Keller was one of his students. Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876 and founded Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885.
- Joseph Pulitzer was also born in 1847. He moved from his native Hungary to Boston in 1864, and made a fortune as a newspaper publisher. Never one to shy away from yellow journalism to sell a few papers, he worked tirelessly to expose dishonesty in government. His will provided for founding the School of Journalism at Columbia University and the establishment of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Those awards have been expanded to recognize literature, poetry, history, music and drama.
- Nicola Tesla was born in 1856 in Croatia and moved to the United States in 1884 and became a naturalized citizen. He was a genius in the field of applying principles of electricity to useful purposes. The world can thank Tesla for our everyday use of alternating current electrical system. He also explored early wireless transmitters and the Tesla turbine. He was the first person in the United States to take an X-ray, and other inventors patented most of his ideas. Tesla said, “I don’t care that they stole my idea. I care they don’t have any of their own.”
- Henry Ford was born July 30, 1863, in Michigan. His father had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, to Quebec in 1847 and then onto the United States. Everyone knows the Ford name because, even though Ford, second generation American, did not invent the automobile or the concept of assembly line production, automobiles became commonplace because his mass production made cars affordable.
- On March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein was born in Germany. He later became a Swiss citizen, and after moving around Europe, immigrated in 1940 to the United States and became an American citizen. He was known to the world as a leading theoretical physicist, teacher and pacifist. Einstein changed the way common people regard scientists. He developed E=mc2, the world’s most famous formula. Scientists are still unraveling the consequences embedded in his General Theory of Relativity. He is also remembered for his work on gravitational waves and unified field theory.
- Passenger manifests show Friedrich Trumpf immigrated to New York City from the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1885. He scored big in the Klondike Gold Rush. His son, Fred, learned carpentry early and built a construction business in the New York City area. On Memorial Day, 1927, he was arrested for his participation in a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens but never formally charged. He later gave at least $1 million to his son, Donald, to help him begin a real estate business, which went in and out of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Donald appeared in a television show and later, the grandson of a German immigrant became President. No one knows yet what school kids will remember about him.
Other influential immigrants
Some who immigrate to the United States are influential although maybe not famous. According to an article by Stuart Anderson in Frontlines, “Between 1960 and 2014, 23 immigrants won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.” In 2013, all three winners in Chemistry were immigrants to the United States – Michael Levitt from South Africa, Martin Karplus from Austria and Arieh Warshel from Israel.
University of California-Santa Barbara Professor Shuji Nakamura, who was born in Japan, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which help improve energy efficiency. Twenty-one other physicists who immigrated to the United States won Nobel Prizes between 1960 and 2014.
Since 2000, 25 of the 72 – 35 percent – Nobel Prizes awarded to American citizens have gone to people who immigrated here. Anderson also points out, “At the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, 62 percent of the cancer researchers are immigrants. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, 56 percent of the researchers are foreign-born.”
Here is a brief list of other influential Americans who were born elsewhere.
- Sergey Brin (Russia) – co-founder of Google and currently the 13th richest person in the world
- Madeleine Albright (Czechoslavakia) – first woman to be Secretary of State
- Steve Chen (Taiwan) and Jawad Karim (East Germany) – co-founders of Youtube
- Dikembe Mutumbo (Democratic Republic of Congo) – pro basketball player and UNICEF global ambassador who worked with CARE, the Polio Eradication Campaign, and his own Dikembe Mutombo Foundation
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) – author and social rights advocate known for these observations: “Racism should never have happened, so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.” Also, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Guetty Felin (Haiti) – first filmmaker from her country to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Ayiti Mon Amour.