Macmillan/McGraw-Hill
 

Adventures in Time and Place
Grade 4: New Jersey
Infographic #6: The Path of the Immigrant
Page 184

Name___________________________________________    Date________________

1. Take a tour of Ellis Island, the first stop on American soil for more than 12 million people. What do the information and photographs reflect about the people and their experiences? Visit Ellis Island: Gateway to America.
http://tqjunior.thinkquest.org/5101/

  • Read the opening page and then click A Brief History of Ellis Island.
  • Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click and read each of these sections:
         Ellis Island at a Glance
         The Exams
         The Immigrants
  • To see some photos of Ellis Island from 1880 through 1920, go to http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/070_immi.html.

Online Activity: First Stop, Ellis Island!
Use the information from the Web sites to answer the following questions. Type your answers into the spaces provided.



   What geographic features made Ellis Island an ideal immigration portal?
   

   Immigrants came to America for many different reasons. List one of the reasons and tell how an immigrant might have thought life in America would be different.
   

   The immigrants had to pass mental, physical, and legal exams to gain access to America. Explain why the legal test was the most feared.
   

   Look at the number of immigrants who came from each country. What can you infer about Italy and Russia? Finland and Switzerland?
   

   Why do you think that the experience at Ellis Island was frightening and unhappy for many immigrants?
   

   Although Ellis Island is no longer used for immigration, tell why you think it is still important today.
   


2. You’ve read about the millions of people who came to America through Ellis Island. Now, take a look at current facts about New Jersey’s foreign-born population at New Jersey: Census Bureau Data.
http://www.fairus.org/html/042njcbu.htm

  • Read about New Jersey population in 2000. What changes have taken place?
  • Then, scroll down and read "1990 Census Data on the Foreign Born."
  • Study the table "Foreign Born Change Since 1980: Top Ten Countries."
Offline Activity: Graphing New Jersey
Your Infographic says that the number of immigrants from Germany in 1900 was 119,598. Use this number and the table at the Web site to make a bar graph comparing the number of immigrants from Germany in New Jersey in different years.
  1. Round the 1900 value to the nearest thousand (119,598 becomes 120,000).
  2. At the Web site, find the number of German-born people in New Jersey in 1980, 1990, and 1996. Round each value to the nearest thousand.
  3. Label the vertical axis "Population (Thousands)." Let each division stand for 10 thousand.
  4. Mark the four different years on the horizontal axis.
  5. Complete your graph. Label it "Changes in Immigration."


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