African-Americans and Immigration in American Life
Joseph Wickliffe
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Migration from Europe
Among roughly fifty-five million immigrants who have, in historic times, come to what is no the United States, nearly seven out of ten came from Europe, and other people came from Africa as slaves. Asians, and Latin Americans have also come. Up until the 1960s Europeans predominated in migrations, A classic essay by the British historian Frank Thistlewaite, was presented to an international congress of historians in 1960 2(Thistlewaite;s Essay, :Migration from Europe Overseas in the 19th & 20th Centuries"). Ironically this was just before the point in history when the emigration of Europeans from Europe was becoming less numerically important than migration into Europe by persons from New World, Africa, and Asia. Coming to America, whether as a sojourner or a settler, was in many cases an adventure, a drama, even a dream. For many the adventure became a disaster, drama a tragedy, dream a nightmare. Despite these and other negatives, American immigration was and is overall a success story. It reflects the positive gains of the nation.
