Becoming White: Irish Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The rise of ethnic groups out of successive waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not been the only or even the major source of social differentiation and at times fragmentation in American history. An even older source is race, which has been a most significant and abiding force in the structuring of society, politics, and economics and in the forming of American self-understanding since the beginnings of European settlement in North America. In sharp contrast to the voluntary immigrations that brought millions of Europeans to these shores, Africans, Native Americans, and Mexicans were incorporated into the population by force, through enslavement and conquest. Race has also been a factor in immigration itself. In a variety of ways specific to different groups, until well into the twentieth century, American law has restricted the entrance of Africans, Asians, and other non-European peoples into the United States and has limited opportunities for citizenship among those non-white immigrants.