On your journey back in time, you discovered that there were different waves of immigrants.

Between 1830 and 1850, some 2.5 million immigrants, most of them from Great Britain and Ireland, arrived in America. They dug canals, ran steamboats, and worked in the factories that were being built. German farmers migrated to Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri, where land was inexpensive. Norwegians and Swedes soon followed, settling in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin. From 1868 to 1882, 160,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in this country as laborers.

By the early 1880s, immigration patterns were changing. From 1901 to 1910, some 70 per cent of all immigrants were coming over from southern and eastern Europe. There were Italians from southern Italy, Jews from Russia and Poland, and diverse ethnic groups from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During this same period, almost 130,000 Japanese immigrants arrived in America.

The end of World War I saw still another wave of immigrants from war-stricken nations coming to America. In 1920, about 250,000 immigrants entered the United States from Europe. In 1921, more than 650,000 immigrants from Europe arrived. Like all good detectives, you summarize your findings in your notebook. Your last entry looks like this.

What did these people find when they arrived?