The New Immigrants.

The 1910s were the last decade in American history in which immigration to the United States from Europe was unrestricted. The largest groups to immigrate during the 1910s were from eastern and southern Europe. Motivated by a population explosion in Europe and economic opportunities in the United States, Italians, Poles, Jews (from the Russian pale), Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, Armenians, Serbians, and Hungarians poured into the country. Between 1880 and 1940, the period that historians have labeled the "new immigration," more than twenty-six million people immigrated to the United States from Europe. It was the single largest mass migration of human beings in world history, and many American cities were flooded by the new immigrants. By 1910 in New York, for example, about 40 percent of the population was foreign-born and another 38 percent was firstgeneration native-born. The new immigrants brought with...