White Ethnics

The New Immigration

The majority of the groups considered white ethnics arrived in the second stage of the massive migration from Europe, known as the New Immigration, which started in the 1880s and continued until 1924, when restrictive legislation ended the massive immigration. This wave brought an unprecedented number of immigrants to the United States. They came mostly from southern and eastern Europe and were predominantly poor, non-English-speaking Catholics and Jews. Their cultural, religious, linguistic, and class difference made them targets of acute prejudices, comparable to the discrimination faced by racial minorities. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century, many of the groups referred to as white ethnics today were regarded, both by the WASP elite and by contemporary scientists, as separate races. Their perceived distinctiveness and inferiority were formulated not only in cultural but also in biological terms. Thus, people who were Polish, Italian, or Jewish were frequently described as possessing idiosyncratic physiological characteristics, as well as lacking in intelligence and skills.

As generations passed, those initially downtrodden and predominantly working-class immigrant groups climbed the socioeconomic ladder, eventually to achieve relatively high levels of social mobility in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1990s, a new interdisciplinary field of social, historical, and cultural inquiry, called “whiteness studies,” began to critically investigate the processes whereby those immigrants gradually came to be regarded as less ethnic and increasingly more white. Whiteness scholars see this social transformation as rooted in the development of an overarching white identity across European immigrant groups. Contemporary census records indicate that despite their perceived racial inferiority, southern and eastern Europeans as well as Irish were even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries categorized as white. This shared categorization in terms of skin color must have been helpful in forging a new identity that often depended on emphasizing and reproducing both the perceived and the real differences between white ethnics and the people of color. The result of those efforts—the social construction of a pan-ethnic white category—alleviated many of the hardships experienced by white ethnics. It also erased some of the differences among the various European ethnic groups while simultaneously establishing a more rigid boundary between whites and everybody else.

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