Italian Americans

Mass Immigration and Anti-Italian Prejudices

It was only after the 1870s that immigration from Italy became a massive influx. From 1880 to 1920, more than 4.1 million people from this country landed in the United States, with a peak of some 2 million between 1901 and 1910. Repatriation was high and equaled 30 to 50 percent of arrivals, according to different estimates. Most Italians had a sojourner mentality. They planned to go back to their birthplace and to enjoy there the money they anticipated making in America in a few years of hard work and saving. Yet not many became wealthy. The leading exception was California-born Amadeo P. Giannini, who founded the forerunner of the Bank of America in 1904 and made it the largest privately owned financial institution in the world. His family remained in America. So did the almost 1.8 million Italian immigrants who still resided in the United States in 1930.

The beginning of the mass entries coincided with major changes in the regional origin and training. Contrary to their predecessors, most newcomers arrived from southern Italy and were illiterate and unskilled laborers from agricultural backgrounds who intended to pursue job opportunities in industrializing America. They settled primarily in slums in the major cities of the East Coast where they had disembarked, or moved inland as they got work in road and railroad construction. Living close to relatives and fellow villagers who had sent for them, they turned their neighborhoods into ethnic enclaves that often reproduced the regional or local divisions in the motherland and insulated the residents from the larger host society. The so-called Little Italy was, in fact, an urban patchwork of a Little Sicily, a Little Naples, a Little Calabria, and so on.

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