Research Paper on:
American Immigration Theories

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
late 19th and early 20th centuries that brought a variety of immigrants to the U.S. shore. Life for the immigrants, however, was seldom easy; according to historians Oscar Handlin and  John Bodnar, immigrants fresh off the ship at Ellis Island did not immediately blend into American culture. The historians, however, are split on their theories of immigration and how, exactly  immigrants reacted to their new lives and new surroundings in the United States. This paper examines the theories of these two men, and notes how these theories apply to actual  immigrants stories. Oscar Handlin, in 1951, published what was to become a Nobel Prize-winning book on historical immigration entitled The Uprooted, The  Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. In this study, he focused not on an America that was a land of milk and honey to the  immigrants who flocked to its shores during the early 20th century, but instead touched on how immigration created broken homes, tore apart families, separated immigrants from known surroundings and placed  them in situations in which they felt alienated, alone and separated from everything they knew and loved (Handlin 75). "The immigrants lived in crisis," Handlin believes, "because they were uprooted"  (Handlin 75). This was also the reason, although Handlin doesnt state it as such, that immigrants tended to feel more comfortable among their own kind, thus making assimilation into mainstream  America that much more difficult. Most immigrants, Handlin notes, seem to come from villages or farms near villages, which is where many had their lives centered (Handlin 76). "The village  was a place. It could be seen, it could be marked out . . .pinned down . . . described in all its physical attributes" (Handlin 76). The village, above