Door #1: back in [old country] your family was in the uppermost crust/caste, but when they came to the US they found that nobody cared. They were just another bunch of immigrants from god-knows-where.
Door #2: your family was in the bottom-of-the-barrel lowermost out-group, but when they came to the US they were the equal of any other fresh-off-the-boat family. They only went up from there.
Door #3: somewhere in between.
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mixed bag, lateral move socially but with a massive leap in economic prosperity
Dad’s side: poor Irish, moved to the US, worked in mills and as cops, very rapidly working/middle class
Mom’s side: working class Irish, moved to US, opened business, almost immediate jump to middle/upper middle class
I would say it was an upward movement for them. My grandparents have an unusual story when they came here from India, because my grandfather was from a wealthy family and my grandmother was dirt poor. My grandpa actually was arranged to some other woman Who was of his social standing and he did not want to marry her and kind of pissed off both families by calling it off. They weren’t living in a mansion or anything but my grandfather had like nice clothes and went to a private school which already put him in like the top few percentage points of wealth in India. When they moved here, I think it might have been a slight downward social status thing to find he was just like everybody else, but my grandmother certainly experienced an explosive upward movement in her social moving here. They both made way more money here than back in India though, like astronomically more.
Door 2. Went from slums of Rio to solidly middle class suburban family in the USA.
I am eternally grateful for my father.
They moved up, I think. They had trades in the old country (butcher, cobbler) but they worked in other people’s businesses. Shortly after their arrival in the US, they had their own shops, living in apartments upstairs.
My parents are white anglophone Canadians so they fit right in lol
Well part of my family would’ve been killed if they stayed where they lived, so I reckon that’s probably as bottom of the barrel as you can get.
My grandfather came from rougher working class stock in Wales (eg alcoholic fishermen), snagged a full ride for an engineering education, effectively co-founded a manufacturing company and retired upper middle class.
Undoubtedly being white and English speaking helped, but his brothers who stayed did not have anything like his life trajectory.
My paternal grandparents came here from Mexico as poor, uneducated migrant farmers. My grandfather was eventually able to get a union job and citizenship, and they eventually managed to buy a small house with a yard in the suburbs. All of their children finished high school or GED and are comfortably working class or middle class (all retired now), and their grandchildren are middle class: about half of us have a bachelor’s degree, some of us have advanced degrees, some are business owners, some have held executive positions.
All Americans except Native Americans, and maybe some Mexican-Americans, are from immigrant families. My family went from starving to non-starving.
My Abuelo was the first born in the US, we probably had better social status in the US because people in Nicaragua were kinda trying to kill us…
My dad’s family were large rural landowners in Cuba. Cattle and farming. Not “money rich” but certainly affluent. They lost it all when Castro took over and almost his entire family emigrated here in 1961. My dad had a college degree but little language skills. He became a bus driver and did that for 40 years. He worked hard, raised 4 kids and died in the house he owned. What always surprised me was that he never expressed an ounce of regret or anger about the hand fate dealt him. It may sound trite, but it was always more important to him to live free. And he did.
My mom was from the peasant class. She was a cleaner in my grand mother’s house in Cuba and my dad fell for her. She was the only member of her family to move here. My dad hated Castro and the regime so much, but almost every month he and my mom would send money through a broker to her family left there to help them. It’s a tradition we maintain to this day.
Oh man, are you kidding? On my father’s side, door #2 all the way!
We’re Jews, and we came from villages in what is now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. And man that was *bad*. Even though some of my family was professionally successful (one of my ancestors was even a chief plasterer on the Tsar’s palace), they constantly faced the threat of horrifically violent pogroms.
We came to America right before things started getting really *really* bad during the revolutionary days of 1905-17, but the harassment and attacks were always a danger. Of course just a couple generations later and almost all the Jews there were enslaved or exterminated during the Holocaust.
We came to America with literally nothing. My ancestors built businesses, were clever and hardworking, and within three generations our family was solidly upper-middle class.
As for my mother’s side… that’s more complex. Our French ancestors came in like ~1680-1700 to what is now Canada (Acadia, not Quebec). They were forced out brutally by the British during the Acadian expulsion.
And our Sicilian ancestors… well, they came over in the 1920s after some… shady business… went south. Things became, shall we say, violent beyond what was normally expected in their line of work. Our family history is similar to the plot of the first Godfather movie, with an added dose of fleeing persecution by the fascists. So while they were poor in Sicily, they did have a kind of local power, respect, and authority.
Like my dad’s side, though, they came over here and built prosperous, peaceful lives for themselves. And, I know for a fact that none of that generation felt they had lost out on anything just because they “family business” wasn’t viable anymore. They wanted to get away from all of that.
They’re not from a place where status is a thing. I’ve never heard anyone in any branch of my family worry about being looked down on or looking down on somene else.
Economically, they were either poor over there and poor over here, but with more opportunities. Or, there were some family that were refugees so their biggest concern was that unlike a lot of the people they had known they weren’t dead.
I don’t know what the status was in the old country for most of them. I don’t think any were upper class society people. Middle or lower class I guess.
I know my grandfather before he came to the US in 1920 was unemployed, worked as a driver sometimes, was an amateur boxer. I think his family was not rich but I don’t know how poor they were. I think he came to the US because it was hard to find a job there at that time. In the US he went into construction. He operated heavy machinery. He did road work, helped with a dam project, dug basements and swimming pools. He didn’t get rich or own his own construction business but he had steady work and supported a wife and 3 kids.
Most of my ancestors were farmers and came to the US before the 1880’s. They may have had some farmland or worked on someone else’s farm. Some of them definitely owned some land after they came to the US. Their kids all had their own farms. Their kids and grandkids got to go to school. Maybe that would’t have been possible in their former countries.
Well… my family got to stop being persecuted, so I guess it’s a massive step up
My granddad came over from Ireland where his family owned a decent bit of land and a farm. My gran was from Poland. I don’t think her family were very well off. Grandad became a lawyer after the war and they had it pretty good for a while (apartment in the city, nice car and a lake house). Sadly, he died when my mom was young and she grew up on the poorer side.
Kinda #1. Grandpa was an academic in Argentina and doing a professorship exchange in the NYC area during the dirty war.
So he wasn’t a celebrity or anything, but was respected there in his discipline, and respected here.
Door 3. Financially moved up by a modest margin (probably based off high salaries) but socially we moved down a lot. My mother’s side was essentially old money, meanwhile my father’s side is still in lower middle class. In the US we are upper middle class.
My father is a colored, technically ESL US citizen now. Seeing how his brother turned out, I have no doubt he made the right move for himself. I do wish he was a bit more forward-thinking when it came to my ma and his kids though. I think my education and health were significantly better growing up here but frankly my career prospects are stagnating pretty bad nowadays. I do speak enough of mother tongue and have enough connections that returning to the motherland is an enticing prospect…maybe an extended holiday will be sufficient.
Door 3, my parents did fine before immigrating & their social statuses didn’t change after they got here, the US simply had more jobs in their field that paid them more and that put my immediate family in a better position than everyone else in my family who stayed
In Germany my great grandfather was an educated miner but he also owned the apartment building they lived in. After getting here, he was a miner and homeowner. I don’t think much changed for them class-wise other than no longer being under the emperor’s thumb.
Door 2, but it wasn’t immediate. We were poor our first decade in this country, lower middle class the second decade, and now middle class these last 3-5 years. Took awhile to live the American dream and it’s still not fully realized.
Kind of similar when they first came over – from poor farmers in Japan (Meiji period) to farm laborers in Los Angeles. But several generations on, we’re all university educated “white collar” folks.
Great Great Grandfather barely spoke a lick of English, and my Great Grandfather, despite knowing English still preferred to stay in a community of Polish-Americans. Most of them came from Clergy/Miners and the tradeoff after coming to the United States was bible sellers and steelmill workers.
Sometimes your family just had unique talents for certain things and sticks to them for sanity.
Mom’s side was higher. They weren’t rolling in money by any means but there was some generational wealth that was built. It’s all gone now due to poor decisions by a couple people. Wild to have grown up in the harsh poverty that I did when I had family that could’ve actively changed that. Maternal Grandmother blew all the money on a bowling alley at the end of the 90s. Then what was on my material grandfather side was all used up on legal fees for my aunt and mother and what money was left the family. As for my dad’s side of the family it’s pretty much stayed the same, poor and big family.
Mom: lesser version of door 2, she didn’t get indoor plumbing until high school but was doing pretty well when she came here
Dad: Door 3, pretty much just a lateral shift, came from working class, still in working class when he met my mom
One side of my mother’s family was wealthy when they came here in the 1600s from England. The other side was German Jews that came over from Russia in the early 1800s and were grocery shop owners. They became wealthy over here. One side lost a lot of their money in the Great Depression and became middle class. They other side lost their wealth in civil war and stayed upper middle class.
My father’s side is Native American.
We went from a lower-middle class family in the DR with a tight community, and our family had a reputation as being well liked. Half of our family was arab, which made us stand out a bit (not in a negative way at all). People knew rumors and gossip about us, they knew who was inheriting what property, which son was following their fathers profession, which daughter was marrying into which family etc. We were ‘somebody’, to put it simply. That was very important. Not somebody *powerful or influential*, but still somebody.
When we came to the US we were suddenly alone cramped into basically a tenement apartment building in Brooklyn. We earned more money, and it blew us away that we could buy a TV so easily, but we were very suddenly ‘nobody’. We were bottom of the barrel, a poor cramped immigrant family working minimum wage jobs. Both of my parents became depressed. My siblings hated the move.
So yes, there was undoubtably a massive decline in what could be perceived as ‘social status’. The result was that a lot of my family gradually moved back (and then sometimes moved back, again, to the US).
But over time, my family once again became ‘somebody’. We became more well known to neighbors and business owners. We dated and married into other families in the neighborhood (including me, I married a girl two blocks down from me lol). Is it the same as the DR? No, of course not. Family, as an identity, is not as important in America. But we aren’t as isolated and downtrodden as when we first moved here.
It is mixed. My parents, both from South Korea, met here in Texas after their parents migrated here. My fathers family was wealthy and landowners from the country. Most of their wealth was stolen by the Japanese, but they were still well off and never worried about going without meat. My mother was from a poor family in the slums of Seoul who, with her siblings, couldn’t afford school except for the private one funded by churches. In the US, non-Koreans looked at both of them the same. Now, they are solidly upper middle class with a great house.
My family stems from the personal hair stylist for the Empress of France. Napoleon III suspected that they were having an affair and the Empress smuggled him into the States. My family started a very successful large hair salon in Manhattan. So what did my brilliant family decide to do with their fortune? They all moved to Wheeling, WV to open a new salon there. Wheeling was marketed as the next NYC. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
My family tree went from wealth to lower middle class.
If my family held onto the property in Manhattan then it would be worth $35M today.
Door #1. My grandmother came from a wealthy British family and married my American grandfather during WWII. Moving to California and becoming a US citizen was not anything she ever expected to do. She was raised with maids, a cook, and nanny. Then she became the maid, cook, and nanny to her own middle class American family. Everyone still laughs about her attempts at cooking a meal.
My dad’s family were indentured Czechs, so great-grandmother coming to the US as a child with a new name and clean slate was eventually upward. Surviving alone as a tween and teen was initially rough. She died middle class but never got to see her family or Czechia again.
About the same….Went from middle class in the UK to middle class here.
Lesser on all accounts, through each branch of my tree. So Door 1 for me. But I’ve worked very hard and we’re nearly where we once were. Most of my ancestors came here fleeing political situations that would have resulted in their loss of wealth and status anyway, with a single exception: I’m directly descended from a Jacobite transported as an indentured servant after the ‘16. He’d already lost everything by then.
I guess Door 2 ish. My mother was middle class and my father was upper middle class from Taiwan and they immigrated to the US decades ago. They recently retired at 65 with a net worth of roughly $9M, so still in upper middle class. Majority of people around us probably don’t know them too well.
My 4 great-grandfathers came from 4 different European countries in the 1895-1910 timeframe where they were all sharecroppers in Europe. Three of them (Lithuanian, Hungarian, Slovak) became coal miners in Pennsylvania and lived in company towns. I’d say their social status stayed the same. They were cheap labor on both sides of the Atlantic.
My Italian GGF became a baker and owned his own home & business within 15 years. His son married the daughter of the Lithuanian coal miner and pretty much blended into the middle class of the 1930s/40s.
Door #2: 16 year old boy fleeing Kaiser Wilhelm I, no property, little money, comes to NYC, and conscripted into the Union Army in the Civil War. Captured, sent to a POW camp in south Louisiana, lost part of an arm to injury and infection. Walked mostly barefoot to Iowa and started his life. Died with quite a bit of land, successful dairy and delivery company, served as head of the county school board for years. His descendants were able to avoid subsequent 20th century European wars, famine, and hardships because of his adventurous choices. I am grateful.