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Analyze The Relationship Between 1890-1920 Immigration And Urbanization

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The relationship between immigration, urbanization, and industrialization became dominantly significant by the launch of the Progressive Era between the years 1890 and 1920. Immigration increased at a staggering rate in which millions of immigrants from Western Europe, Southern Europe, and Eastern Asia sough economic opportunities. The United States, in the era, experienced large portions of its lands altered into massive cities with expanding industrial infrastructures. Despite these factors having greatly transformed American life, the nation’s inhabitants have only begun to realize the consequences for such an inevitable step of progress. Immigration had always been viewed as either a problem or a blessing on America ever since the first …show more content…

Despite the opposition of many Americans, immigrants have supported the US economy tremendously by obtaining low-paying and unwanted jobs, and have spread their diverse cultures and languages into public schools and communities. On the other hand, whites were still arguably the dominant race in the United States to which led to the ‘melting pot’ of American society. Many immigrants, commonly at Ellis Island, faced bribery from political party members by offering shelter, food, and employment in exchange for a vote for their certain party. Although these bribes shortly became highly complicated due to government voting regulations, the actions by the political parties strongly supported the process of assimilation of the immigrants into American culture and society. Moreover, massive waves of immigration had also led to growth in cities and in agricultural areas that in which eventually gave in to industrial economies in order to profit from the abundance of unemployed …show more content…

However, this was accounted by many of the cities in the New England and Middle states, but with the connection of the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts by railroads, urbanization increased extensively throughout western United States. In addition, the Homestead Act in 1862 influenced many Americans to settle out in the West in which as a result allowed possibility for Western urbanization. New innovations, such as the Bessemer Process and the assembly line, provided new techniques of transportation, and stronger and larger infrastructures that dramatically transformed older cities into very massive and much more complex urbanized areas. Ironic to immigration, very poor Africans and even Whites that were already living in the United States fled to the north to seek job opportunities and to escape discrimination due to enhanced laws caused by the “Plessy v. Ferguson” Supreme Court case in 1896. The large-scale wave of migrants, also called the “Great Migration”, intensively increased the urban population thus contributed to overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions. Not only did the population in cities increase, but the businesses and industries that have been established in those certain cities started to quickly expand across the nation, in which eventually gave rise to

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