50 Fun Facts About Immigration

After a 1998 Supreme Court ruling, most of Ellis Island's land officially belongs to which state?

New Jersey was awarded the 22.8 acres of landfill added over the years to enlarge the island. New York kept about 4.7 acres, including the original island.

Which poet wrote The New Colossus, the sonnet on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?

Emma Lazarus wrote the sonnet in 1883 to raise money for the pedestal, and it played no part in the 1886 opening. A friend had it cast in bronze and mounted in 1903, sixteen years after her death.

Which Bavarian-born immigrant to Gold Rush San Francisco later shared the patent for riveted jeans?

Levi Strauss came west to open a branch of his family's dry goods business, not to make clothes. A Reno tailor named Davis invented the riveted pants and asked him to help apply for the 1873 patent.

The failure of which crop in the 1840s drove more than a million people to leave Ireland?

Potato blight destroyed the staple food of Ireland's poor, and roughly a million people died as well. Hunger and departures together cut the country's population by 20 to 25 percent.

Which physicist, abroad when Hitler took power in 1933, never went home and settled in Princeton?

Albert Einstein joined Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and became an American citizen in 1940. He also kept the Swiss citizenship he had gained as a young man for the rest of his life.

Which coffee-growing country has the most people of Japanese descent outside Japan?

Brazil counts about two million people of Japanese descent. The first 781 workers landed at the port of Santos in 1908 aboard the ship Kasato Maru, bound for plantations in São Paulo state.

Which office does the US Constitution reserve for natural-born citizens, barring every immigrant?

President, along with the vice presidency, is the only office closed to them. Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger could serve as a state governor but can never run for the White House.

Which rock singer was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar and fled with his family to England in 1964?

Freddie Mercury was 17 when his Parsi family escaped a violent revolution and settled in Middlesex. He had spent much of his childhood at British boarding schools in India.

Which metaphor for America's mix of cultures was popularized by a 1908 Israel Zangwill play?

Melting pot entered everyday speech after Zangwill's play of that name opened in Washington with Theodore Roosevelt in the audience. Critics who think cultures stay distinct prefer the image of a salad bowl.

Which colorful nickname is given to the US document that proves permanent resident status?

Green card comes from the greenish color of earlier versions of the document, once called an alien registration receipt. Holders are required to carry it at all times.

A family from Italy immigrates to Argentina, but which verb describes their leaving Italy?

Emigrate comes from the Latin for moving out, while immigrate comes from the Latin for moving in. Both words describe the same journey, seen from the two countries involved.

Which term do geographers use for conditions like war or famine that drive people out of a homeland?

Push factors are the troubles at home, such as hunger, drought or a lack of jobs. Their opposites, pull factors, are the things that attract a migrant to the new place.

Which legal process, usually ending with an oath of allegiance, makes an immigrant a citizen?

Naturalization rules vary from country to country, but most require a minimum period of legal residence and some knowledge of the national language or culture.

Which protection may people fleeing persecution seek abroad under a 1948 UN declaration?

Asylum is set out in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The idea is far older: ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Hebrews all recognized a religious right of sanctuary.

Which word, from the Greek for scattering, describes a people living far from their homeland?

Diaspora was first used for the exile of the Jews from their homeland in ancient times. The word has since been borrowed for many other peoples settled far from home.

Which term for hostility toward foreigners combines Greek roots meaning stranger and fear?

Xenophobia first appeared in print in a London newspaper in 1880, describing English attitudes toward the French. The same article paired it with its opposite, xenomania.

Which Latin legal term describes citizenship by birthplace, a rule found mostly in the Americas?

Jus soli means right of soil and came down from English common law. Its rival, jus sanguinis or right of blood, passes citizenship from parent to child and is linked to the French Civil Code of 1804.

Which term describes money migrant workers send home, a flow far larger than global foreign aid?

Remittances reached about 780 billion dollars in 2021, sent to some 800 million people. Foreign aid that year totaled roughly 200 billion dollars.

Which cheapest class of sea travel sent passengers to Ellis Island while richer ones skipped it?

Steerage passengers were ferried to the island for inspection, while first- and second-class travelers typically bypassed it altogether. The name likely comes from quarters near the ship's rudder.

The Bracero Program, begun in 1942, brought farm workers to the United States from which country?

Mexico supplied workers under millions of short-term contracts between 1942 and 1964, the largest foreign worker program in United States history. The Spanish word bracero means a manual laborer.

Which immigration station in San Francisco Bay held detainees who carved poems into its walls?

Angel Island detained and interrogated new arrivals from 1910 to 1940, and more than 200 of the poems they left behind have been recovered and restored.

Which 1882 law was the first major US measure to bar a whole national group from immigrating?

The Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by Chester Arthur, barred laborers for ten years, then was renewed and made permanent. Repeal came only in 1943, when the two countries were wartime allies.

Who signed the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act at the foot of the Statue of Liberty?

Lyndon B. Johnson chose Liberty Island for the ceremony because his administration saw the law as historic. It abolished the national origins formula that had shaped who could enter since the 1920s.

Before Ellis Island, which former entertainment venue in Manhattan was New York's immigrant depot?

Castle Garden received more than 7.5 million arrivals between 1855 and 1890. Built as a fort, it later became the first home of the New York Aquarium.

Ellis Island inspectors used a buttonhook to examine immigrants' eyes for signs of which disease?

Trachoma, a bacterial infection that can lead to blindness, could get an Ellis Island arrival sent back. It spreads through contact with discharge from an infected person's eyes or nose.

Ellis Island officials never renamed immigrants; they copied names from which travel records?

Ship manifests were the only immigration records for people entering the country, so the renaming story is a myth. Inspectors, who knew three languages on average, often corrected mistakes instead.

Restaurant cook Wong Kim Ark's 1898 Supreme Court win confirmed birthright citizenship under which amendment?

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, makes citizens of people born in the United States. Wong, born in San Francisco, had been refused re-entry after a trip abroad.

Which nickname stuck to the anti-immigrant American Party of the 1850s?

Know Nothings were required to say they knew nothing when outsiders asked about the movement. It ran Millard Fillmore for the White House in 1856 and declined rapidly after his defeat.

Which 1980 exodus carried some 125,000 Cubans to Florida after Fidel Castro opened one port to them?

The Mariel boatlift took its name from the Cuban harbor where the boats loaded. Cuban Americans organized the flotilla, and within days as many as 300 boats were collecting passengers.

Which neighborhood, home to the Tenement Museum, once drew the bulk of New York's immigrants?

The Lower East Side packed newcomers into crowded tenements around 1900, and part of it was once known as Little Germany. The museum preserves apartments at 97 Orchard Street, home to immigrant families from 1863 to 1935.

Which Scottish-born industrialist began as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill and funded 2,509 libraries?

Andrew Carnegie reached Pittsburgh at 12 in 1848 and changed spools of thread twelve hours a day, six days a week. A colonel who lent his books to working boys inspired the library gifts.

Which Serbian-American inventor reached New York in 1884 to work for Edison, then built an AC motor?

Nikola Tesla quit the Edison Machine Works after six months. His AC induction motor patents, licensed by Westinghouse in 1888, made him independently wealthy.

Which Russian-born songwriter landed at Ellis Island at age five and later wrote God Bless America?

Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin, arrived in 1893 and called the song an expression of his feeling toward the country. He wrote it for a wartime show, set it aside and introduced it 20 years later.

Whose family fled the 1948 Czech coup before she became America's first female Secretary of State?

Madeleine Albright, born in Prague, was eleven when her family sailed from Southampton and landed at Ellis Island in November 1948. She took office as the country's top diplomat in January 1997.

Which Hungarian-born publisher and ex-cavalryman raised funds for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?

Joseph Pulitzer ran the campaign through his newspaper, the New York World, and it raised more than 100,000 dollars. He had been recruited in Hamburg in 1864 to fight in the Civil War.

Which Moscow-born computer scientist reached America at age six in 1979 and later co-founded Google?

Sergey Brin left the Soviet Union with his parents after they were granted exit visas in May 1979. He met his future business partner during an orientation for new students at Stanford.

Which Founding Father, born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, was sent to New York as a teenager?

Alexander Hamilton wrote such a vivid letter about a 1772 hurricane that community leaders raised a fund to send him north for his education. He reached Boston by sea that October.

Which Danish-born journalist exposed New York tenement life in How the Other Half Lives?

Jacob Riis landed in 1870 aged 21 with 40 dollars from friends, hoping for work as a carpenter. He became one of the first photographers to adopt flash, which let him shoot the darkest corners.

Which Nobel Peace Prize winner co-founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889 to serve immigrant families?

Jane Addams became the first American woman awarded the prize, in 1931. She is also recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.

Which French Protestants fled abroad after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685?

Huguenots gave English the word refugee, first applied to those who fled France after the revocation. English authorities welcomed them with public and private money, and they founded England's silk industry.

The 1947 Partition uprooted over 12 million people as British India became India and which country?

Pakistan and India exchanged millions of people along religious lines amid large-scale violence. Delhi took in so many newcomers that its population nearly doubled between the 1941 and 1951 censuses.

The refugees known as boat people fled by sea after 1975 mainly from which Southeast Asian country?

Vietnam saw almost 800,000 boat people reach other countries safely between 1975 and 1995, though many others died at sea. Arrivals peaked at 54,000 in the single month of June 1979.

Which place on the Moselle gave its name to the 1985 deal that ended many European border checks?

Schengen is a town in Luxembourg at the point where its border meets those of France and Germany. Five of the ten member states of the day signed the deal there, aboard a boat on the river.

Which Geneva-based UN agency for refugees, established in 1950, has twice won the Nobel Peace Prize?

UNHCR won the prize in 1954 and again in 1981. Its original mandate covered only Europeans displaced after the Second World War, a limit that was lifted by a 1967 protocol.

After a 1961 agreement, which country supplied West Germany's largest group of guest workers?

Turkey pressed West Germany for the deal, and its workers, largely from rural areas, soon outnumbered every other group. The first such agreement, in 1955, had been with Italy.

Which country's 1901 law let officials bar arrivals with a dictation test in any European language?

Australia kept the fifty-word test until 1958 as the key tool of its White Australia policy. One multilingual visitor passed in several languages and was finally failed over a test in Scottish Gaelic.

Which country, in its centennial year of 1967, introduced the first points-based immigration system?

Canada began scoring applicants on youth, education, experience and fluency in English or French instead of where they came from. Several other countries have since adopted versions of the idea.

Which ship docked at Tilbury in 1948 and gave its name to a generation of Caribbean-born Britons?

The Empire Windrush had been launched in Germany in 1930 as the liner Monte Rosa. It carried 1,027 passengers on the famous voyage and sank after an engine room fire in 1954.

Which port city's Pier 21, a liner terminal from 1928 to 1971, took in nearly a million immigrants?

Halifax also saw 496,000 military personnel sail from the same pier during the Second World War. The building is the last surviving seaport immigration shed of its kind in the country.

Which Norwegian polar explorer gave his name to passports issued to stateless refugees from 1922?

Fridtjof Nansen promoted the document after Soviet Russia stripped citizenship from Russians living abroad. About 450,000 were issued, and the office behind them won the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize.