The immigration issue has once more bubbled to the surface in America because of the provocative statements and assertions by one of the Republication contenders for the party's presidential nomination.

Immigrants – especially illegal immigrants – are accused of stealing the jobs of "real" Americans, of mooching off the welfare state at the expense of taxpaying U.S. citizens and legal residents and threatening the political status quo of the nation since "we all know" that too many of those immigrants, if given citizenship, will vote for the political plunderers who offer them more of other people's money.

America the Land of Opportunity for the New Comer

It is a cliché, but it is no less true: We are a nation of immigrants. It is estimated that between 1840 and 1914, around 60 million people left Europe to settle somewhere else in the world. About 35 million of them came to the United States. The remainder found new homes in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada or Latin American countries such as Brazil and Argentina.

They came to America usually for one (or more) of three reasons: to escape religious persecution, to get out from under political oppression, or to find economic opportunity for the better compared to the government controls, regulations or heavy taxes experienced in the "old country."

In the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of Irish came to the United States. They left behind famine and unwanted British Rule. In the 1860s and 1870s, a wave of Germans came to America's shores. They were looking for a better economic life and avoidance of the military draft due to Prussian-led wars that resulted in the unification of the Germanic states into Imperial Germany in 1871 under Kaiser Wilhelm I.

In the 1880s and 1890s, many Italians and Poles came to America looking for better material circumstances for their families. In the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, there arrived a significant number of Russian Jews who were escaping from poverty, religious persecution and violence in Imperial Russia.

In between came Scandinavians, Scots, Hungarians, Lithuanians and Latvians, Romanians and Greeks, and many, many others.

Some Looking for a Second Chance, Others Brought in Chains

All were looking for a "second chance," a new beginning in a new land that greeted many of them with the Statue of Liberty as they entered New York Harbor. Most of them did not know the English language; many were illiterate or had only limited education; they were often "low skilled" with limited experience with working in the emerging modern world of commerce, industry, and trade.