Immigration IV Welcome! You are encouraged to register with the site and login (for free). When you register, you support the site and your question history is saved. One strain of historical thought that achieved popularity in the 1950s forwarded the notion that immigration - more than the frontier experience, or any other specific event or factor - had been and continued to be the defining element of United States history. In this depiction, the 30 million immigrants who entered the country between 1820 and 1900 had common experiences regardless of their national, religion, or race: namely, in experiencing hardship and alienation, they themselves changed, but they also carried on the development of the nation itself. Both casual and formal students of history should, however, be careful in equating the experiences of different groups of immigrants, especially under the somewhat blurring concept of "hardship." The description that all immigrants experienced hardship and immigration fails to account properly for the fact that in the 17th and 18th century millions of Africans were forcibly shipped to the United States and sold into slavery. While this group of people should not be excluded from any full reckoning of the nation's migrants, its alienation and hardship was of a substantially different character from that of the other populations, who migrated more willingly and independently and who arrived under and lived in vastly different conditions. If it is, indeed, the hardship and alienation experienced by the nation's migrants that have above all shaped both them and their nation, then to ignore this distinction would be to distort an important element of what our nation has been shaped to be. Which of the following best describes the function of the last sentence of the passage? It provides an example of how the hardship of African migrants to the United States was of a fundamentally different character than that of other groups. It advances a critical relationship between the theory of immigration discussed and the flaw in that theory described by the author of the passage. It provides further evidence of how African immigrants cannot meaningfully be compared to immigrants of other groups. It illustrates an irreconcilable contradiction between the theory of immigration discussed and the flaws exposed by the author of the passage. It outlines the conditions that must be met to repair the theory under discussion about immigration. Review Answer