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DocsTeachThe online tool for teaching with documents, from the National Archives National Archives Foundation National Archives

How Have Americans Responded to Immigration?

Weighing the Evidence

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How Have Americans Responded to Immigration?

About this Activity

  • Created by:National Archives Education Team
  • Historical Era:Across Historical Eras
  • Thinking Skill:Historical Issues-Analysis & Decision-Making
  • Bloom's Taxonomy:Evaluating
  • Grade Level:High School
Start Activity
Please use a tablet or desktop computer to use this activity.
In this activity, students will analyze documents related to immigration in the United States. Then they will determine whether immigration was welcomed or feared by Americans, and to what degree, by placing each document on the scale according to their analysis.

This activity borrowed several documents and modified the central question from educator Gary Colletti's Immigration: Liberty’s promise fulfilled?
https://www.docsteach.org/activities/student/how-have-americans-responded-to-immigration

Suggested Teaching Instructions

This activity can be used to explore the topic of immigration with students. With documents spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, this activity may serve as a “past to prologue” exercise before discussing the current events surrounding immigration. This activity can be completed in class, in small groups, in pairs, individually, or assigned as homework. Designed for students in grades 6–12. The approximate time needed is 50 minutes.

Opener: Read an excerpt of the famous Emma Lazarus sonnet “The New Colossus,” which is found at the base of the Statue of Liberty, out loud:


"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Ask students to think about and consider:
  • How have immigrants been treated in America?
  • How have Americans responded to immigration?
  • Is America the land of opportunity for immigrants? Should it be?

Encourage students to keep these questions and their first reactions in mind as they complete this activity and analyze documents from the past.

Open the activity and select one of the documents. Model careful document analysis, ending with the question How did Americans respond to immigration? based on this document. Demonstrate how the scale works and ask students to place the document they just examined on the scale according to the interpretation it best supports: either America welcomes new immigrants and opens her doors to them, or Americans are fearful or skeptical of new immigrants and have tried to exclude them.

Explain to the students that they will need to place each photograph and textual record on the scale based on careful document analysis.

After students complete the activity, they should click on the “When You're Done” tab and answer the questions listed. Conduct a class discussion based on the students’ answers from the document analysis.

Students might note that American attitudes toward immigration have become more balanced based on the documents. For example, the Chinese-Exclusion Act and the Immigration Quotas of 1924, which were based on country of origin, have been eliminated. Students may suggest that the United States welcomed immigrants when their labor was needed or when the conditions in their home country were terrible.

Students may also mention that Americans seemed more welcoming when they thought immigrants could become good citizens. On the other hand, students will probably note that immigrants were feared when our country was economically struggling—when jobs were in short supply (or perceived to be) or when the United States was at war with an immigrant’s country of origin.

Documents in this activity

  • "Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty"
  • Naturalization Act of 1790
  • Act of December 17, 1943, Public Law 78-199, 57 STAT 600, to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and for other purposes
  • Alien and Sedition Acts
  • Flyers Distributed by Silver Bow Trades and Labor Assembly and Butte Miners' Union in Support of Chinese and Japanese Boycott
  • Foreign-Born Friends who are Applicants for American Citizenship
  • Immigrants Arriving at the Immigration Station on Angel Island
  • Incident Memorandum Regarding Cuban Refugees, Southern Florida
  • Interrogation of Lev Kotz, alias Lebe Nissinoff, "Russian Hebrew," by federal Immigration Board of Special Inquiry, Angel Island Immigration Station
  • Letter from German Hospital to Commissioner of Immigration, Angel Island Station, regarding enemy alien Ernst Hamann
  • Manifest of Alien Immigrants for the SS Brasilia
  • Memorandum from Harry S. Truman to the Secretary of State and Others
  • News from the U.S. Department of Labor, "Federal Stop-Order on Indio Farmer" (USDL-IX-59S56), San Francisco, August 3, 1959.
  • Oath of Allegiance of Mikael Amerikian
  • Photograph of Immigrants Landing at Ellis Island
  • President Lyndon B. Johnson Signing the Immigration Act
  • Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, introduces President George W. Bush at the US Chamber of Commerce where President Bush gave a speech on Immigration
  • Texas of North America

CC0
To the extent possible under law, National Archives Education Team has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to "How Have Americans Responded to Immigration?".

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