Source: NY Times.
In 1908, when a play called “The Melting Pot” was first staged in New York City, helping to popularize the term, New York had a foreign-born population of over 40 percent, but the city was 98 percent white (which could include people of Hispanic origins). The foreign-born population of the country as a whole was around 15 percent, and nearly nine out of 10 Americans were white. This was a few years after these words were mounted on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Categories: Americas