As such, migration was driven in part by people fleeing these conflicts (such as the Hmong from Vietnam) and others looking for economic opportunity (such as students coming from places like India).

Migrant workers were often underpaid and housed in poor conditions, leading to a series of labor strikes among farm workers.

The US then acquired Puerto Rico in 1898, but declined to make it a state (and add a brown, non-English speaking population)

During WW2, the government implemented the Bracero Program, wherein guest workers from Latin America were able to come north to work in the agricultural sector.

By the 1960s, relatively few people from Europe are clamoring to come to America. So this third wave is characterized by people come from what we call the developing world, especially from Latin America and Asia.

They sent their kids to school with Wonderbread sandwiches, hosted barbecues on the weekend, etc., etc., while reveling in the American Dream - home ownership and whiteness.

After WW2, all those Greeks, Italians, Slavs and others packed up the kids and moved out to the suburban paradise of postage stamp lawns and picket fences and began a period of forgetting. Forgetting that their names came from elsewhere, forgetting that they were ever not part of mainstream America.

Rather, it led to the empowerment of ethnic minorities through organized crime, such as Al Capone’s Sicilian Outfit out of Chicago and the Jewish Purple Gang in Detroit.

Whereas the Klan had been a rural, Southern institution that had been largely put down during the 1870s, this (second) Klan was active in cities across Midwest, terrorizing not only Blacks, but Catholics, Jews, and anyone else they felt was acting against their ideas of American values.

When they moved, they found urban centers full of (unAmerican) New Immigrants, as well as crime, corruption, and vice.

Feelings of displacement and economic insecurity among the Old Stock led to the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan.

This drastically lowered the number of immigrants entering the country until 1965. Which means, for everyone born between 1925 and 1965, immigration was almost a non-issue while growing up.

They then passed a series of immigration laws in 1921 and 1924.

These laws put quotas on the number of incoming migrants according to 1890 levels. Between 1900 and 1920, Central, Southern, and Eastern Europeans made up 2/3 of immigrants. In 1890, they were only a quarter.

The Finnish language was identified as having its roots in Asia, making them Chinese.

This had to be litigated in court, and it was decided in 1908 that while the Finns were still Chinese, they had been living under the influence of the Swedes for long enough to mitigate any negative attributes.

We now would consider people from Finland to be among the most white - they are Scandinavian after all. But this was not the case in 1900.

In fact, many people thought that the Finns should be barred from immigrating under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Why?

They were then likewise barred, not by law, but by a diplomatic settlement known as the Gentleman’s Agreement because whites in California didn’t want any more Asian immigrants competing with them for jobs.

There were also the Japanese. While the Chinese had already been barred from immigrating in 1882, over 200,000 Japanese migrants made their way to what would become Hawaii and the Pacific coast from 1891-1907.

For one thing, there were people coming from the Middle East - what was then the Ottoman Empire. These included Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Armenians and others. Some of them were Muslim, but many of them would also have been Christian or other religious minorities, such as the Maronites or the Druze.