Immigration in America and Upstate New York: Past and Present
by Winn Wasson, Social Science Librarian
Immigration is currently a contentious topic in the United States. However, it’s important to note that immigration has always been a contentious topic in the United States, even before there was a United States. The country and Upstate New York have experienced many successive waves of immigration and migration over the centuries, and Indigenous Nations have all the while had to contend with the people in these waves not recognizing Indigenous claims to their Nations’ lands. Furthermore, not all settlement in the United States was voluntary, as Africans were kidnapped and enslaved for nearly 250 years. The result is a country—and an Upstate New York—that are a broad tapestry of people who are present in the country and in this region for a multitude of reasons that are the result of their own individual decisions, decisions by their ancestors or decisions made for their ancestors by someone else.
This December and January, Syracuse University Libraries is displaying books about migration to and within the United States and Upstate New York to contextualize the contemporary debates the country is engaged in. The display chooses items from the Libraries’ collections that showcase how the themes of these debates have been persistent and consistent over the centuries. Like today’s immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, in the 19th century, people from places like Ireland, Italy and elsewhere in Eastern, Central and Southern Europe came to the United States for economic opportunity and as refugees fleeing persecution in their former nations. And like today’s immigrants, the people who came in the 19th and early 20th centuries were often met with hostility by people whose ancestors had arrived in earlier decades. Part of this display seeks to inform Libraries' users about these past trends and how they can help us understand the present. In addition to books about historical 19th- and early 20th-century immigration, there are books about Black Americans in Upstate New York who freed themselves from enslavement or came to the area as part of the Great Migration, and the Haudenosaunee, who have been forced to endure waves of newcomers, deliberately or unknowingly settling on their ancestral lands. Of course, the display also includes books for those interested in exploring contemporary issues related to immigration in the United States and Upstate New York and the waves of immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America and the Caribbean who have come since the immigration reforms of 1965.
Take some time to look at the display and its accompanying Immigration Research Guide next time you are in Bird Library or on the Libraries’ website to learn more about the complicated history and complicated present of immigration to the United States and Upstate New York.