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"The Scandinavian immigrant to the United States," wrote historian Wittke, "has been the Viking of the Western prairie country." In the mid-19th century, American newspapers carried accounts of immigrant Swedes disembarking en masse from cargo ships and marching -- often with their country's flag carried aloft -- to railway depots where trains would take them upriver to Buffalo, along the Erie Canal and thence to the prairie country of the upper Mississippi valley. "What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become!" wrote Frederika Bremer in 1853, and she was right. Today about 400 place names in Minnesota are of Scandinavian origin.
After 1880, immigration changed once again. Most of the newcomers were from Eastern and Southern Europe: Russian Jews, Poles, Italians and Greeks. They too left the Old World to escape poverty and, in the case of the Jews, persecution. Like their predecessors, they were mostly peasants, but they faced a different and unhappy prospect. The great era of frontier settlement was coming to an end. After being processed at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay and other immigration centers, millions of these rural folk found themselves confined to the mean streets of urban ghettos like Manhattan's , festering Lower East Side, working at menial jobs and crammed into narrow railroad flats that lacked both heat and privacy.
The nativist sentiment that foreigners are somehow inferior to the American- born may be the nation's oldest and most persistent bias. (Curiously, it was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census took note of where Americans were born.) Apart from slaves, Asians (principally the Chinese) suffered most from this prejudice. Seeking fortune and escape from the turmoil of the Opium Wars, Chinese first began arriving in California during the 1840s. Initially, they were welcomed. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese were working in the state's gold fields, many of them as prospectors. As the ore gave out, former miners were hired to build the Central Pacific Railroad; others dug the irrigation canals that poured fertility -- and prosperity -- into the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys.
The Chinese were rewarded for their labor with low wages, typically a third less than what white workers could earn. Even so, hostility forced them from many jobs as times got tough. Excluded from the mines and farms, many set up shop as laundrymen, a trade that did not exist in their homeland. They were ineligible for citizenship under a 1790 federal law that limited that privilege to whites. In 1882 Chinese workers were barred from entering the U.S. by an act of Congress that was extended indefinitely in 1902 and was not rescinded until 1943.
After the Chinese were excluded, Japanese became the principal concern of nativists who feared America's contamination by a "Yellow Peril." The shameful nadir of this bias followed the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Under pressure from security-conscious Army officials, the Federal Government exiled more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to internment camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. Despite this humiliation, 30,000 Japanese Americans served in uniform, and the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Battalion became the most decorated units in U.S. military history.