To what extent were the “new” immigrants pushed out of their native countries or “pulled” to America?

Question

To what extent were the “new” immigrants pushed out of their native countries or “pulled” to America? Why did so many return to their native countries and why were Jews the major exception to this trend?

Answer 1

You say that migrants are "pushed" out of their country by negative events (war, famine, unemployment, persecutions, environmental hazards). On the other hand you say that they are "pulled" in the US by positive things (religious and political freedom, jobs, better salaries, good universities, peace, etc.).

Emigrating out of your native country is rarely pleasant. You seldom do it for fun so once you've reached the point you wanted to reach in the US you logically want to come back home. A simple example is a person who has been in a US university may well go back to her country after graduation. The other example is person working for 5, 10 or 20 years in the US, and who has managed to save a little capital and goes back to her country with enough money to start a business/marry/live only with her rents. The Italians in particular were famous for coming and going several times in a lifetime across the Atlantic. For instance in the book "the Christ stopped in Eboli", the author meets several men speaking English and freshly back from "la Nuova York" in a small southern Italian town called Eboli.

Now I am not sure about what it is you mean about the Jews' exceptional status. The main problem being that there are at least three waves of Jewish immigration in the US. The one before WWI mainly from Poland, the one prior and after WWII from Europe as a whole, and finally since the 1950s from Israel. The specificity may be that for the Eastern European Jews (Yiddish), the community they were coming from is nearly extinct and that it appears that the Yiddish community only survives in the US... maybe.

Another option is that the Jews fleeing the n***s in the 1930s (a minority of the Jewish immigration to the US) were nearly the only ones leaving their country mostly for non-economic reasons. For instance the previous waves of Jewish migration had always coincided with massive labour demand from the US economy rather than with the Cossak persecutions. So basically, they'd only leave Poland once they knew the US economy was striving and that they could find a job. In other words, the 1930s Jewish migrants are an exception considering that for them the push factors were significantly more important than the pull ones.

Here it is interesting to remark that peasants in the villages of Italy, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Poland and Germany were aware of the situation on the US job market as early as the 1860s thanks to letters written by their friends already in the US and to newspapers carried by the ships. An impressive feat when you know that most of them could harly write their own name.

Answer 2

Most immigrants to what is now America (I'm including prior to 1776 as well) came here for economic reasons (or were indentured servants and obviously there are slaves), although many of the original settlers came for religious freedom reasons.  I don't think so many have returned--many Irish, south Asian Indians and Koreans have returned since the economy improved, and some Russians and other central Europeans since the lifting of the Soviet era, but most ethnic groups have stayed in the US.   Jews really didn't have anywhere to go (often they weren't allowed back into countries) until the establishment of Israel.