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By the early 1830ies up to thousand ships at a time were engaged in carrying cotton from America to Liverpool.
Most of these ships made their return journey empty, until the shipowners found a new cargo: people.
The Atlantic crossing took up to three months, the ships were not intended for passengers and diseases like typhus, which was commonly called shipfever infested the human freight.But people were willing to endure almost every hardship to get to America, if the price was right.
By the mid century a one-way ticket from Liverpool to New York could be had for as little as 12$.
In the decade 1845-55, 3 million immigrants arrived in theUnited States,a country that had a population of only 20 million at that time.
In just 20 years ( 1830-1850) the proportion of foreign born immigrants in America rose from one in a 100, to one in 10.
Between 1815- 1915 America took 35million immigrants.
7 million came from Germany.
5 million each from Italy and Ireland
3,3 million from Russia
2,5 million from Scandinavia and thousands from almost everywhere around the globe.
Especially for small countries this meant a significant drain of human sources.
For example Ireland was the most densley populated country in Europe by 1807.
50 years later it was one of the least.
The immigrants tended naturally to congregate in enclaves.
In the first half of the 19th century the German immigrants dreamed of Pennsylvania becoming an entirely German state, where German would be the official language.
By 1855 one third of New York´s population was Irish born.
Between 1880 and 1900 one-third of the Jewish population of Europe came to America and again almost all of them settled in New York.
By the turn of the century NY had become the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen.80% of its population were either foreign born or the children of immigrants.
In 1908 the British Zionist Israel Zangwill wrote a play that gave the Americans a term for that phenomenon.He called it the Melting Pot.
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