Steerage, the 1900s. A week or two out of Hamburg, Naples or Liverpool, the ship passes the statue into New York harbour and the emigrants are ferried to Ellis Island: a doctor's chalk mark on a coat, a few questions, a ferry to Manhattan. Between 1880 and 1914 more than twenty million Europeans land in the United States, and millions more in Argentina, Brazil and Canada.
The pressure
Steam has made the Atlantic cheap. American grain undercuts the European peasant who grows it; railways reach villages with more sons than land; pogroms push Jews out of the Russian Empire; American factories pull. A letter home with a ticket in it does the rest.
Which future
Emigrants look for land, wages, and a way out of conscription or a pogrom; many mean to go back, and a large share of Italians and Poles do. Steamship lines fill steerage. American employers want labour, and American nativists a wall.
What survived
The cities that build American industry are emigrant cities, and the army that crosses back in 1917 is full of their sons. Then the door shuts: quotas in 1921 and 1924, aimed at southern and eastern Europe, after a law that had barred the Chinese since 1882. In the 1930s many Jews trying to leave Europe have nowhere to go.
Whose story
Oscar Handlin wrote the emigrant as a peasant torn from his world, uprooted; later historians answered that families and whole villages crossed together and rebuilt themselves, transplanted.