Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Assimilation But Were Afraid To Ask

As if by centennial design, the first and last decades of the twentieth century were eras of large-scale immigration (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). During the first decade of the twentieth century, the United States saw the arrival of what was then the largest wave of immigration in history when a total of 8,795,386 immigrants, the vast majority of them European peasants, entered the country. By the 1990s, the wave of “new immigration” (which began in 1965) peaked when about a million new immigrants were arriving in the United States each year. By 1998 the United States had over 25 million immigrants, setting a new historic record. ¹