The Immigrants (Part I)

The history of America is the history of immigration. Archeological and DNA evidence indicates that the earliest immigrants to America were Asians from Siberia, and that they came across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait into Alaska 21 to 42 thousand years ago. The people who reached Alaska around that time would have found their way south across Canada blocked by glaciers until 12 thousand years ago. Soon after the glaciers melted, however, these Asian-Siberian immigrants settled all over North America, and within another thousand years were in South America as well. Current estimates are that anywhere from 10 million to over 100 million of these first immigrants, later named Indians by the Europeans, were in the Americas when the first Spanish explorers arrived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Tragically, within 130 years of these first contacts, according to some scholars, approximately 95 percent of the Indians had died of European diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, for which they had no immunities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the first immigrants arrived between 5 and 10 thousand years ago, and became divided into four distinct tribes: the Coast Miwoks, the Wintum, the Yokuts, and the Ohlone. These were the tribes encountered by the first Spanish explorers and Franciscan priests who established the California missions and founded San Francisco in 1776.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Europeans immigrated to America. By the mid-nineteenth century, the tide of immigration from Europe swelled to as many as 250,000 a year, predominantly from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. As early as 1848, the first Chinese immigrants began to arrive in the United States through San Francisco. By 1869, 20,000 Chinese had been brought to California by the Central Pacific Railroad to build the transcontinental railroad. By the mid 1870s, there were approximately 100,000 Chinese immigrants in this country, many of whom eventually settled in San Francisco. In the decade of the 1880s, more than 3 million immigrants came to America from Western and Eastern Europe, including a large number of Eastern European Russians, Poles, Russian/Polish Jews, Austro-Hungarians, Czechs, Greeks, and Italians. Before the American Civil War, a trickle of Italian immigration had begun, but after the war ended in 1865, Italian immigration grew dramatically, rising to 32,000 in 1882, and tripling to 100,000 immigrants per year by 1900. Among the nineteenth-century Italian immigrants were approximately 350 Jesuit priests, escaping the political turmoil and persecution that accompanied Italian national unification.

Most of the Italian Jesuits migrated to the American West, where they established schools and churches and ministered to the surviving Native Americans in what came to be known as the Rocky Mountain Mission. A Belgian-born Jesuit priest, Fr. Pierre DeSmet, who had worked among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, was instrumental in convincing the Jesuit Superior General in Europe to send the Italian Jesuits to minister to the Native Americans in the Western United States. By 1896, the schools of the Rocky Mountain Mission enrolled over a thousand Native American students from a host of tribes: the Yakimas, Umatillas, Nez Percés, Cheyennes, Assinoboines, and Crows. These Jesuit institutions consisted of boarding schools for boys and girls and included printing presses, workshops, and farms. Other Italian Jesuits established missions in the Southwest, and, as described in Vignette #10, in California. Following the surge of immigration to California after the Gold Rush, Jesuits established churches and educational institutions throughout the state, including Saint Ignatius Church and Saint Ignatius Academy, the antecedent of the University of San Francisco. The Jesuits of California also worked in hospitals and prisons and provided other social services to the newly arrived immigrants. Thus, the earliest Jesuits in the Western United States ministered to the needs of the ancestors of the first Asian immigrants to America and also to the needs of the most recent European immigrants. The work of the Jesuits of San Francisco with the Irish and Italian immigrants of the late nineteenth century has its counterpart today at the University of San Francisco, where first- and second-generation immigrants from throughout the world now make up a significant percentage of the student population.



Bibliographic note: The story of the first immigrants to America is effectively told in two different articles that appeared in the magazine Discover:”Coming to America,” by David Meltzer, which appeared in October 1993, and “The Latest on the Earliest,” by Jared Diamond, which appeared in January 1990. Recent research on the sophisticated culture and enormous size of the Native American population in the Western Hemisphere on the eve of the Spanish explorations and the decimation of that population because of European diseases is summarized by Charles Mann in “1491,” which appeared in the March 2002 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Many of the missionary activities of the Jesuits in the West during the nineteenth century are described in “Across the Rockies: Italian Jesuits in the American West,” by Gerald McKevitt, S.J., a Santa Clara University historian, which appeared in the November 2000 issue of the magazine Company. Michael Kotlanger, S.J., USF archivist, also supplied some important details about the Jesuits in the West during the nineteenth century. The classic works on European immigration to America are Oscar Handlin’s the Uprooted and Marcus Lee Hansen’s The Atlantic Migration 1607–1860. Page Smith’s The Rise of Industrial America: A People’s History of the Post Reconstruction Era effectively places nineteenth-century immigration patterns, especially the Chinese experience, within the broad sweep of American history.