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Yet if they weren’t the poorest of the poor, most immigrants were not skilled or educated. 5
In San Francisco in the 1880s, Irish immigrants were five times as likely to be unskilled as the
city’s broader population. In Detroit, German immigrants were almost twice as likely to be
unskilled workers as their native-born neighbors. In Pittsburgh in 1900, fewer than 10 percent Joshua Zeitz
of Polish immigrants and just 18 percent of Italian immigrants were skilled workers.
We like to think of America as the kind of place where an unskilled but industrious
newcomer can quickly climb the economic ladder. And sometimes it is. But those cases
were few and far between a century ago. Most of the country’s first-generation white ethnics
arrived as unskilled factory and farm laborers and remained as such in their lifetimes.
In Poughkeepsie, three-quarters of Irish immigrants remained unskilled workers until
retirement or death. In his famous study of Boston, the historian Stephen Thernstrom
found that just 13 percent of working-class residents born in the 1850s — many of them
immigrants — clawed their way into the middle class; among those born in the first decade of
the twentieth century, only 14 percent. These trends were the norm.
Even the most model of “model minority” groups — Eastern European Jews who 10
arrived in the United States between the 1880s and early 1920s — were principally engaged
in the unskilled needle trades or as small business owners. Stereotypes notwithstanding,
in the 1940s just 24 percent of Jewish men in New York — first and second generation,
alike — claimed a college- or graduate-level education. In 1957, that figure climbed to 28.5
percent, and, by 1970, it was 36.4 percent — well above similar educational achievement
levels for Protestants and Catholics, but still far short of a majority. While 75 percent of
Jewish men in that decade qualified as “white collar,” most were small business owners; only
14 percent worked in licensed professions like law, medicine or insurance.
In the same way that immigration to the United States was part of a global phenomenon,
it was also usually an economic strategy. Leaving aside groups like Eastern and Central
European Jews, and the Irish, who had compelling economic and political reasons to make
a permanent journey, a large portion of immigrants to the United States were “birds of
flight” — temporary residents who came to America to work, stock up money and return
home, usually with dreams of buying a farm or shop in their native countries. Over half of all
southern Italians came and went. So did 64 percent of Hungarians, 59 percent of Slovaks and
40 percent of Germans.
We think of that generation as different and special, and for those families that took
root in the U.S., they were. (Certainly, that’s how I regard my great-grandparents: with
reverence for the sacrifices they made so that I could one day write this article.) But most
immigrants came here with mixed and often hardheaded intentions. Some came in search
of opportunity and a fresh start. Others came to experience political enfranchisement and
personal liberty. But most were not starry-eyed dreamers — they were ordinary people trying
to do the smart thing for themselves and their families; in an age when America experienced
rapid urban and industrial growth, moving to New York, Chicago or San Francisco was
simply a logical decision.
Large numbers of early immigrants arrived in the United States without English-language
skills. Even among many Irish newcomers in the mid-19th century, Gaelic, not English,
was standard. Studies of second-generation Germans in Wisconsin in 1910 found that
Immigration and the American Dream CONVERSATION
73
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