For a historian of immigration observing current debates, less disturbing than what people don’t know about immigration history, are the things they “know” that simply aren’t true. Recent immigrants are often held up to an impossible standard of the melting pot that was a much slower and more messy process than it appears in the romanticized hindsight of public memory. This paper offers an overview of the process of negotiation and mutual accommodation that has always figured prominently in the integration of immigrants into our society over the past two centuries. Except for the origins of immigrants and the color of their skin, little has changed over the last two centuries. English is alive and well, even on the Mexican border and the West Coast. In Amy Tan’s autobiographical novel, The Joy Luck Club, an immigrant mother laments that her daughter’s Chinese vocabulary hardly extends beyond “pee-pee” and “choo-choo train,” asking plaintively, “How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?” Immigrant parents have been asking that question for a long time. Some things never change.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the concept of agency – i.e., purposeful self-determination based on calculated choice – enjoyed a hegemonic position in the literature of the social history of European immigration to the United States. The original inspiration for this development in immigration historiography was the path breaking 1964 essay by essay by Rudolph Vecoli challenging the classic work on Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951), which saw immigration as a jarring experience of alienation and confusion that left immigrants defensive and poorly adjusted in their new American homes. This essay reexamines the conflict of views associated with Vecoli’s challenge to Handlin in two contexts. One is the conceptual and empirical foundations of immigration historiography, and the second is the origin and early development of the New Social History, in British and American labor history and in the history of African American slavery and in Western neo-Marxism thought, which sought a humanist alternative to Communist ideology. The essay seeks critical engagement with agency, and advances the view that we should open ourselves once more to seeking guidance in Handlin’s interpretive understandings, which also suggests a reevaluation of the contributions of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the now century-old source of Handlin’s views.

The article examines the link between the admission of refugees to the United States and the country’s foreign policy interest during the Cold War. The author analyses the post-war American refugee assistance acts and immigration laws to reveal U.S. policy choices made between safeguarding country’s security during the Cold War to taking political advantage of the refugee arrivals. The factors that provided for the refugees’ entry to the U.S. during the Cold War were determined by foreign policy concerns and the decisions related to the refugee crises were the domain of the executive up until 1980s. Given the Cold War context, most of the refugee crises occurring behind the Iron Curtain in Europe benefited U.S. psychological warfare programs, while Asian and Latin American refugees, often a consequence of direct (at times covert) U.S. political-military-economic involvement, put the U.S. on the defensive.

Bowling played a key role in community life among Polish Americans in Milwaukee during the first half of the 20th century. This working-class pastime was uniquely suited to industrial Milwaukee, which long held the reputation as “America’s bowling capital,” and the Polonia of the city accounted for a dominant share of its bowling public, focused for the most part in alleys within taverns on the Polish “South Side.” The locally-based Polish American Bowling Association attempted to unite Polish American bowling nationwide under its leadership. The bowling culture of Polish Milwaukee came to an end by mid-century, linked with larger social phenomena such as suburbanization and ethnic succession in what had been traditional ethnic urban neighborhoods.

This paper explores the influence of social context, class, and ideology on attitudes toward immigrants in the US. Using the conceptual frames of heterophobia and resource competition, we hypothesize that between 1996 and 2014 attitudes toward immigrants would become increasingly negative because of changes in the social context, in particular the growth in the number and diversity of immigrants. We also hypothesize that people in more precarious labor market positions, without a college education, and with a conservative religious ideology will have more negative attitudes toward immigrants. Using the General Social Survey at three points in time (1996, 2004, and 2014), we find mixed support for our hypotheses. Attitudes toward immigrants became more positive in the overall sample, but more negative for religious fundamentalists. Religious ideology and education were better predictors of attitudes toward immigrants than employment status and self-identified class. In general, the data show more support for the heterophobia explanation for negative attitudes than the resource competition explanation.

International migration is a major issue in many parts of the world today. In the United States, with its history of immigration, it has been a recurring theme in political discussion for over two centuries. This article addresses three issues: (1) providing data to establish the size, composition, and recent trends in immigration to the U.S. today, (2) a review of 2018 U.S. public opinion polls on immigration, and (3) an interpretation of why a subject where most Americans generally agree has caused protracted emotional and divisive debates over the past two decades.

The aim of the paper is to analyse migration networks from the mezzo- and microsocial perspective on the example of the Strzyżów district in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship. The research focuses on the ties between migrants and people who do not actively participate in international movements. Migration networks from the Strzyżów district are analysed in a comparative framework from the following perspectives: 1) diachronic, in relation to contemporary migration flows, as well as those of the early 20th century, 2) synchronous, taking into account internal and external networks of the studied villages and towns.
Comparative analysis is based on both primary and secondary sources. The data describing migration flows at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries originate mainly from the Ellis Island Archives. Based on the analysis of passenger lists, which is also available on the Archive’s website, I managed to reach more than 4000 immigrants from the examined localities of the Srzyżow district, who left for the United States between 1873 and 1924. As far as modern migrants are concerned, data was collected using various methods: ethnosurvey, participant observations and in-depth interviews. The research was conducted from both perspectives: country of origin (Poland) and country of destination (United States).