The people who fueled industrialization in the nation’s expanding urban centers migrated domestically from more rural areas and came from nations all over the world. Students may consider these questions to organize their study of immigration: Who came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century? Why did they come? What was their experience like when they arrived? A distinct wave of southern and eastern European immigration between the 1890s and 1910s (distinct from an earlier mid-nineteenth-century wave of immigration that resulted from European developments such as the Great Irish Famine) brought tens of millions of darker skinned, non-English-speaking, non-Protestant migrants to American cities.Pushed from their homelands for economic, political, and religious reasons, this diverse group was pulled to America with hope for economic opportunities and political freedom. Asian immigration continued to affect the development of the West despite a series of laws aimed to restrict migration from the Western Hemisphere, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Land Act of 1913. The southwest borders continued to be quite fluid, making the United States an increasingly diverse nation in the early twentieth century.Industrialization affected not only the demographic makeup and economic growth of the country; it changed the way that ordinary people lived, worked, and interacted with one another. At the turn of the century, a growing number of the U.S. population lived in urban areas in small, crowded quarters, often termed tenements. Designed to house as many individuals as possible, tenements were notorious for poor ventilation, lack of sanitation, and substandard construction.