Points of Entry: A Nation of Strangers

Lewis Hine "Joys and Sorrows on Ellis Island," c. 1905 Lewis Hine's image elegantly encapsulates the powerful emotions associated with leaving one country and one life, and beginning another.

Eugene Omar Goldbeck
Immigration Border Patrol, Laredo, Texas, February 1926, M.M. Hanson, Inspector in Charge
This is the first photograph of the newly established Border Patrol, which was commissioned in 1924. Little effort was made to control the Mexican Border until WWII made U.S./Mexico border security seem more necessary.

Unknown Artist "Beware of Foreign Influence!" 1850 Labor unions feared the competition of new arrivals who were willing to undercut prevailing wages to get a foothold in America. Capitalizing on their discrimination, employers found the Chinese to be a seductive alternative to increasingly militant and organized white laborers.

Dorothea Lange "Braceros," c. 1938 Prior to the official government Braceros program (initiated August, 1942), trainloads of Mexican workers were recruited and transported to southwestern states.

James Newberry
1987
Grandfather and children at Japanese street festival. The children's father is of Japanese ancestry. Their mother is of European ancestry.
Older generations attempt to instill an understanding of their original culture in the younger ones, but in the end it is the children who generally teach the parents and grandparents how to be Americans. This reversal of roles is unsettling to many cultures, but for better or worse it is the most common form of cultural transmission in immigrant families.