The immigrant experience in the United States was one that consisted of a drastic transition in peasant life which uprooted citizens from their native villages. Their villages served not only as their homes and workplaces, but as communities and as a way of identifying themselves as a people. However, varying political and economic upheavals in their homelands caused them to seek out other options, as it came down to a matter of do or die for many, not a matter of choice. Once in America, they had to struggle with the unfamiliarity and alienation that was thrust upon them in the New World. The situation of uprootedness was not limited to the English or Irish, but to peasants in other countries, as well, including the Italians, Chinese, and Mexicans.

The Italians fled from their villages in flocks of millions at the end of the 19th century . Although reluctant to leave their established communities, the high cost of oil, along with widespread starvation and cholera outbreaks forced them to make the trip overseas.# Italians did not migrate out of their own volition, but rather because