Immigration in the United States
The framers of the Constitution who wrote “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…. ... As we have entered into the 21st century, today the American challenge with immigration is of a much different picture than it was 200 years ago. The United States, a country once influenced by British character as revealed in David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed, is quickly changing to a multicultural society with dozens of languages and religions. Immigration in the U. ... has rapidly transformed from immigrants first arriving from Western Europe to now massive immigration coming from all over the world, mainly third world countries. As a result of this trend of immigration, “ethnicity” in America has become a controversial subject. ... To better understand why the immigration trend has drastically changed between 1629 to today, one must first have an idea about the history of immigration in the United States. In his book Alibion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer writes about the first accounts of immigration to the United States from Britain. ... The nineteenth-century explanation for the unique institutions of the United States was one of Teutonic "germs" carried into the North America by German and Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Later immigrants determined that the process of ethnic pluralism evolved from the nature of voluntary immigration. Between 1629 and 1775 North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigration. ... The attitudes of each group still persist in the regional cultures of the United States. ... These conservative Anglicans built their manor houses, wore their elegant clothes, and became a dominant force behind the early Government of the United States. The third wave of immigration, between 1675 and 1725, was the Quakers or Friends who migrated from the Northern Midlands of England and Wales into the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania. ... Poor, ambitious, desperate, often violent, and always tempestuous the Celts flowed into the ports of Philadelphia, up the Delaware Valley, streamed down the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, and trickled across the Cumberland Gap into the Southern states.