ABSTRACT
The early decision to throw the country open to virtually all peoples of the world was fateful for the nation, and consequential for the development of American imageries, including those pertaining to mobility, rurality, cities, frontier, and industrialization. Concerning the linkages between immigration and mobility, some seem so self-evident to many contemporary Americans that part of our inquiry must be to distinguish linkages of fact from linkages of image, not with intent to set the record straight but to sketch important conditions and consequences of mobility. Several properties of American immigration, even though the major lineaments of its history are fairly well and widely known, are important here. The nativistic animus against the “hordes” of new immigrants has been marked by a continually evolving imagery and has been a constant feature of the national scene, but especially evident since the mid-nineteenth century. Reformers accepted the task of patching up some of the unfortunate consequences of the nation’s immigrant manpower.
