37 Maps That Explain How America Is a Nation of Immigrants

A nation of immigrants

10) The most famous immigrant in American history

Give me your tired, your poor;

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss’d, to me;

I lift my lamp beside the golden door. 

—Emma Lazarus, 1883

Of course, the Statue of Liberty was itself an immigrant. It was designed and cast in copper in France over the span of a decade, from 1876 to 1884, as an intended gift from the French government to the United States. But the statue then had to wait in France for several months until the Americans had done enough work on its pedestal. It was then shipped to the United States in 350 separate pieces, housed in 214 crates, to be assembled by American workers once it arrived.

11) An insanely detailed map of immigrants in America from 1903

This exhaustive map includes 51 infographics (for each state plus Washington, DC). The right column of the infographic covers how many immigrants settled in the state each year; the left column shows their occupations. The top depicts the ethnic mix, color-coded by race: Teutonic, Keltic, Slavic, Iberic, Mongolic, and "all others."

At the time, those racial labels were real — and the source of anxiety. A medical journal article from this era expressed concern about the "preponderance of the Iberic and Slavic races" among recent immigrants, because of "their poorer physical and mental equipment" compared to "Celtic and Teutonic" immigrants.

12) How charities helped immigrants become American

The organization Hull House (founded by Jane Addams) was devoted to serving Chicago’s urban poor; in the process, it set the template for charity in America. And most of Chicago’s urban poor were immigrants: in 1890, in fact, immigrants made up 77 percent of the city’s population. To better tailor its services to the communities it served (and to assist the federal government in its study of urban “ghettos”), Hull House researchers produced maps like this one, which shows the ethnicity of each immigrant family living in a given tenement block.

The result was that Hull House increasingly focused on teaching English, civics, and other skills that would help immigrants and first-generation Americans assimilate — what would be called the “Americanization” movement. The existence of organizations like Hull House, which were willing to take the time to help immigrants acclimate to America and learn things (like English) that they needed to succeed, was an important factor in helping the European immigrants of 100 years ago assimilate to the point where they simply counted as “white” Americans.