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Hispanic Immigration And The United States

Decent Essays

Hispanic immigration to the United States stems primarily from uniquely developed push-pull migration mechanisms in which “interplay of national, regional, and global economic developments, the history of U.S. military and foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, the checkered history of international border enforcement and interdiction efforts, and, not least, the aspirations of Latin American migrants and potential migrants themselves” (Gutierrez). In other words, migration from Latin American to the United States shouldn’t have been consistent, however, there are several factors that triggered massive waves of such.
The first major wave of Hispanic migration to the United States was in 1848, which was a result from the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The newly acquired lands of the United States hosted a population of about 75,000-100,000 and the U.S. Government offered blanket naturalization to the former Mexican Citizens. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican immigration to the U.S. “average[d] 3,000-5,000” persons per decade, with the exception of the California Gold Rush, where around 10,000 Mexican miners migrated to California, all totaling to about 100,000 Mexicans in the U.S. by the end of the 1900 (Gutierrez). However, “historical migration statistics for this period are inaccurate because of inconsistent enumeration techniques, changing methods of ethnic and racial classification in the U.S., and the constant movement of uncounted thousands of

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