Here's an article I found just surfing the INTERNETS. I thought it was interesting. It is a look at the whole immigration movement from the 1800's with emphasis on the Caribbeans. It is very long. How did I came across this? Why did I think this might interest you? Cause of this poem (A VERY LONG POEM INDEED).
http://www.virtualboricua.org/Docs/poems_pp02.htm The poem made me think of the current Immigration issue. Reading the poem made me think of those crossing the border looking for a better future and how are they surviving. Maybe I am a little emotional today, but I wanted you to know why this person wrote the poem and give you a little history.
http://www.ipoaa.com/caribean_immigration_why.htm By the late 1800s the United States had vested economic and political interests in the Caribbean. United States policy makers considered the region to be strategically important both for commercial routes to South America and for the defense of the southern U.S. mainland against wartime attack. For these reasons the U.S. government pursued an aggressive strategy to establish and maintain control over the political and economic affairs of the region.
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Simultaneously, the period from 1900 to 1920 marked the initiation of mass labor migration from the Caribbean to the United States and the formation of the first large Caribbean communities in the United States (see Afro-Latino Cultures in the United States). This shift was part of a global transformation of migration processes: Rather than a colonizing migration from the expanding commercial centers to the subordinated regions, populations were now moving from the periphery to the new industrial centers. The shift was first evident in the case of Puerto Rico, due to its status as a U.S. territory. In about 1900 Puerto Ricans began to be hired as contract laborers, who were often treated more like indentured servants than free laborers, for plantations in other U.S. territories, mainly Hawaii, and in the southern and western United States. During World War I the recruitment of labor from the Caribbean (and Latin America) became more pronounced, as laborers from the region compensated for the reduced number of European immigrants to the United States. More than 100,000 Caribbean laborers were recruited for agricultural and menial jobs in the United States as part of war efforts.
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Since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, the immigration policies of the United States have been shaped more often by domestic economic concerns and by the emergence of racist discourses against immigrants than by a foreign policy directed at undermining a competing superpower. This was clearly reflected in 1995, when in the wake of large-scale Haitian and Cuban refugee flows, the United States announced it would begin repatriating Cubans picked up at sea, reversing a decades-old policy of automatically granting them entrance and circumventing established asylum procedures. However, attempts by the U.S. government to contain such "refugee crises," and more broadly to restrict immigration, face a likely setback in continued mass migration from the Caribbean. This migration is fostered by economic and political crises in the region, by demand for cheap labor in the United States, and by established links between Caribbean communities in the United States and their countries of origin.
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