How does this latest wave compare to historical ones? It’s unclear exactly how many new immigrants have arrived in Massachusetts in the past two years, because there is no systematic effort to count them all. The state says 11,000 new immigrants were served by state and federal programs from October 2022 to September 2023, and thousands more likely arrived in the past eight months.
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The 2020 census counted more foreign-born Massachusetts residents than ever before in the state’s history, and more new immigrants arrive every day.
However, the proportion of foreign-born Massachusetts residents today is significantly lower than during major waves of immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Immigration tends to occur in waves, as people leave their homes driven by common causes. Here are some of the most important immigration movements that have shaped Massachusetts over the past 175 years:
First wave: the Irish and other northern Europeans arrive
Irish immigrants arrived in the city in the mid-19th century amid a terrible potato blight, which decimated the crop that fed the country’s poor. An estimated one million people died of hunger and disease between 1845 and 1852, and two million Irish emigrated.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Irish residents made up more than 90 percent of Boston’s foreign-born population, according to Global Boston, a Boston College project that chronicles hundreds of years of immigration to the city. The rest of the newcomers in this period They were mostly German, Canadian, English and Scottish.
The number of Massachusetts residents born in Ireland reached its peak in the late 19th century; many moved to other states after initially settling here.
In Boston, newcomers from Ireland settled primarily in Fort Hill, East Boston and the North End, which are not yet the Italian enclave known today, according to Peter Drummey, chief historian of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Many worked as day laborers, merchants, domestic servants, and seamstresses. They relied on “a large number of Irish ethnic and religious identity organizations,” Drummey said, including the Roman Catholic Church, which would eventually help build Catholic hospitals, private schools and colleges, and a number of social institutions to serve those in need. and the Charitable Irish Society, which was established in 1737 and provided material aid and resettlement guidance to Irish newcomers. The society sometimes paid representatives to greet newcomers at the docks.
Early 20th century: Italian and Southeast European immigration intensifies
At the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of radical industrialization, especially in the The gateway cities surrounding Boston, the source of new immigrants, began to change.
Although Irish immigrants continued to settle in Massachusetts into the 20th century, by the early 20th century most newcomers They were Italian and, to a lesser extent, Russian Jews, said Vincent Cannato, an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. According to Global Boston, smaller populations of immigrants also arrived from China, the West Indies, Portugal, Lithuania, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire.
In Boston, Italian newcomers flocked to East Boston and filled the North End, while the neighborhood’s Irish residents moved to other nearby neighborhoods and suburbs. Italians also settled in towns like Braintree and Brockton, he said, “places where factories were.”
Cannato said Italian communities tended to look inward for support, relying on networks of close friends and family, drawing on the networks of those who came before when possible.
“Institutionally, there wasn’t a lot of support” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cannato said. “The dominant institutions in Boston were run by the Irish: the church, politics, the schools.”
Stephen Puleo, author of “The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day,” said that unlike the Irish before them, most Italian immigrants Those who arrived in Massachusetts did not speak English, which made integration even more difficult. Most of the Italians who arrived also came from southern Italy and were relatively dark-skinned, he said, further fueling a divide between the newcomers and the lighter-skinned native Bostonians.
“Most of the support came from family members who had arrived earlier, the Italian ‘social clubs’ that were prevalent during this period” and, to a lesser extent, North End Catholic churches, Puleo said.
He said North End offered affordable housing and access to jobs close to the port and city centre. Regionality remained a key distinction within Italian neighborhoods.
“So, within the far north, the Sicilians settled with Sicilians; Avellines with Avellines, Calabrians with Calabreses,” Puleo said, “and they rarely mixed, not even in a small neighborhood within the North End.”
Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants, who began emigrating from Eastern Europe and the Russian settlement area around the 1880s, continued to arrive until the early 20th century. They settled in what is now the Theater District, the lower South End, and later in the northern and western ends and along Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. In 1910, the West End was home to about 40,000 Jews, according to Global Boston.
Drummey said Boston changed dramatically between the peaks of Irish and Italian immigration, physically expanding through landfills and absorbing once-adjacent cities like Roxbury, Dorchester and Hyde Park.
“It has grown enormously, both physically and especially in population,” Drummey said.
Boston’s population tripled between 1865 and 1915, rising from about 192,000 to more than 745,000, according to data compiled by the Boston Public Library.
But even as Boston’s size peaked at about 800,000 in 1950, immigration fell sharply between the 1920s and around 1965 due to a series of immigration reforms that limited who could enter the United States, they show. census data.
The Immigration Act of 1917 established a “prohibited zone” that excluded immigrants from much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. This followed specific immigration bans, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Subsequently, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established entry quotas based on the populations of foreign-born residents recorded in the 1890 census, further limiting immigration by minority groups.
After restrictions: Asian and Latin American immigration recovers
Massachusetts experienced a surge in newcomers from Asia and the Western Hemisphere following the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which overhauled the quota system and gave priority to highly qualified individuals and those with relatives who were already in the United States. , among others.
Asian immigrants had settled for decades in Massachusetts, but previous waves were relatively small compared to the state’s overall population, Cannato said. Like other groups facing a lack of strong institutional support, Asian communities in Massachusetts tended to look inward for support.
Alice Kane, executive director of the Boston Chinese Historical Society, said Chinatown’s roots were laid in the late 19th century, but the Exclusion Act stifled further growth for more than 60 years.
The quotas outlined in the Johnson-Reed Act granted immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States, according to the 1890 census. It excluded immigrants from Asia entirely, although some still headed to Hawaii and other territories, which were not subject to the same laws.
Those who came to Boston in the late 20th century would largely try to “connect through family ties, the geographic areas that they come from,” Kane said. “Whoever is already here will certainly help whoever comes next.”
That sentiment would drive in part the creation of family associations in Chinatown, semiformal support networks, many of which are now member groups of the New England Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association. The association organizes community events, as well as English and naturalization classes.
Massachusetts also experienced a surge of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean in the late 20th century, census records show.
Among the first Spanish-speaking immigrants to resettle in Massachusetts in large numbers were those of Puerto Rico, according to Aviva Chomsky, a history professor at Salem State University. As American citizens, Puerto Ricans could find work relatively easily, often holding agricultural positions.
Mexican, Central American and Dominican immigrants began arriving in Massachusetts in the 1980s, he said, and tended to settle in Lynn, Lawrence, Salem and other gateway cities.
“We began to see Latin American migration, especially Central American and Caribbean, to the dying textile towns of New England,” he said.
Although a handful of support and resettlement agencies opened across the Commonwealth in the late 20th century, Latin American immigrants also relied heavily on those who arrived earlier.
“Communities themselves are establishing informal institutions and networks that attract new immigrants,” Chomsky said. “It means people have somewhere to go, know people and are integrated into a community.”
The last census, conducted in 2020, found that Latino and Asian communities are driving growth in some cities, including Lynn, Lexington and Hopkinton. This year, a substantial portion of the state’s newcomers come from Latin America and Haiti, and many say they are eager to work but have had difficulty finding employment.
You can contact Daniel Kool at daniel.kool@globe.com. FOLLOW IT @dekool01. You can contact Vince at vince.dixon@globe.com. FOLLOW IT @vince_dixon_.
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