Newcomers from the Mediterranean

By the 1880s, immigration from Germany and Ireland had largely run its course, and Chinese immigration had become severely restricted as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Now newcomers to the United States were primarily from southern and eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

Here in Part III, we will consider the arrival of Italians, Greeks, and Arabs as examples of migrants from lands around the eastern Mediterranean. Of these three groups, the Italian migration was by far the largest. We take it up in Chapter 8. The Arab migration, which began slightly earlier, was not nearly as large, but it was significant in shaping the early Arab-American community, and we take this up in Chapter 10. Meanwhile, in Chapter 9, we explore the Greek contribution to the American tapestry, which only began to grow in the 1890s. (We will explore immigration from eastern Europe in Part IV.)