Immigrants in the 1920s affected the United States in two main ways. One of these impacts was economic while the other was political/social.
As in other time periods of history, the immigrants who had arrived in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s helped the American economy. This was a boom time for the US economy. The country was industrializing rapidly and there were many jobs to be had in factories of various sorts. Immigrants helped the economy grow by providing a large pool of cheap labor. This allowed factories to produce goods at relatively low prices, which allowed more Americans to buy those goods and enjoy a higher standard of living.
However, while the immigrants helped the economy, they also brought some amount of political and social strife. Part of this was because many Americans thought that this wave of immigrants was different from regular Americans. These immigrants came mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. They were largely Catholic or Jewish. Their ethnicity and their religion set them apart in the eyes of many Americans, making them seem like they were too different to ever become true Americans. In addition, some of these immigrants held radical political beliefs. This was a time when socialism, communism, and anarchism all had many believers around the world. The Soviet Union had just been formed, becoming the world’s first communist country. Anarchists were carrying out terrorist attacks in Europe and even in the US. Because some of the immigrants held these beliefs, many Americans did not trust them. The presence of the immigrants led to nativism, which expressed itself in such ways as the National Origins Act of 1924 and the rise of the KKK in this decade.
Thus, while immigrants contributed to the American economy in the 1920s, they also brought about political and social conflict both because of the political beliefs that some of them held and because of ethnic and religious prejudice on the part of “native” Americans.
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