What role, if any, did the First World War play in attracting immigrants to America?
World War I did two things that are completely contradictory. The first thing it did was it shut down all immigration from across the Atlantic Ocean. Since there hadn’t been much immigration from Asia in a couple of years since it was regulated, and since there was very little immigration from Latin America in those days, the source of immigration was from across the Atlantic and the Atlantic Ocean was not a pleasant place for any immigrant boat during the war. Immigration just flat-out stopped during the war years. The second influence was the reverse of the first. The war produced a tremendous surge of unhappy, dislocated, economically troubled people from the broken-up empire of Austria-Hungary, and people just poured out of Europe. You had four years of an absolute lull, and then you had boats arriving in numbers we had just never seen.
