Immigration Then and Now:

In the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a boom in immigration in the United States. Minnesota received a lot of those immigrants. In fact, there were more foreign-born immigrants in Minnesota in 1900 than there are in Minnesota today. Not just by a little bit either; there were about twenty percent more! Most of those immigrants came from Northern and Western European countries such as: Norway, Germany, Ireland, and Sweden.

 Immigrants do not just decide to move to a new country for no reason. There are reasons which make them want to move away (push factors), and there are reasons why they chose the place they are moving to (pull factors). In other words, something is pushing them out and something is pulling them to a location. In the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries the main push factors were poor quality of life (bad farming land, religious and political persecution, no jobs) and the main pull factors to Minnesota were the promise of good quality and free or cheap land, jobs, and religious and political freedom.

The immigrants in the early 19th century tended to find that their quality of life in Minnesota was a lot better than where they hailed from, the later immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries tended to encounter more struggles. They faced discrimination at a greater intensity than those that preceded them. They tended to get paid a lot less, and were offered much less-skilled employment opportunities.