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Round Trip To America Summary

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In Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe 1880-1930, Mark Wyman argues that many new immigrants that migrated to America from 1880-1930 never intended to make America a permanent residence and many of them returned home to their native countries. He claims that this phenomena is important to the history of American Immigration and is important to the histories of the home land in which the immigrants returned to. In his book, Wyman explores some key ideas such as the reason immigrants decided to voyage to a new land, across the ocean, to what was known as the “land of milk and honey” only to return to their small, and a lot of the time rural village. He also discusses American labor movement and what impact that had on …show more content…

For some they returned having never reached this goal, for others they ended up staying in America, but for many of these immigrants they did reach their goal and after doing so, returned home. These immigrants were temporary migrants that had caught “America fever”. (p. 16) Temporary migration had been going on before this time, but it wasn’t until the invention of the steam engine that migrant workers began to voyage across the seas. Many of these poor European’s that migrated to the United States did so to make money to go back home and buy land. Not all of them had this goal, some saved money to start-up or buy a business. Whether they were going back to buy land or expand land they already had, or they were going to use the money to start a business these remigrants all had one thing in common. Wyman writes of the Hungarian emigrant’s experiences; “they would soon return with the money made overseas to make a better life for themselves in the environment they were attached to, the place where they wanted to live.”(p. 49). Because many of these European immigrants only stayed in America a short time many native-born Americans began to have hostilities toward these new immigrants in terms of the American Labor Movement, assimilation politics and nativist’s movements. During the late 1800’s there was a

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