Most scientists believe that human beings first came to America over the Bering Straits about 20,000 years ago. These were the ancestors of the many Native American cultures, which would people the landscape for thousands of years. Around the year 1000, a small number of Vikings would arrive. Five-hundred years later, the great European migration would begin. Crossing the Atlantic meant two to three months of seasickness, overcrowding, limited food rations, and disease, but the lure of available land and the hope for political and religious freedoms kept the Europeans coming. People from Europe and all around the World are still coming today in order to seek out the “Land of the Free.”

The United States of America has embraced and welcomed immigration since its beginning including the likes of Arthur Murray, born Moses Teichmann, who immigrated through Ellis Island to the United States from Hungary in 1912.

Murray grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan where he tried his hand at learning architecture before entering Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia. While at Tech, Murray taught ballroom dancing at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. In 1920, he organized the world’s first radio dance. A band on the Georgia Tech campus played “Ramblin Wreck from Georgia Tech” and other songs, which were broadcast to a group of about 150 dancers situated atop the roof of the Capital City Club in downtown Atlanta.

Murray’s first dance studio of his own was located in Atlanta, and local radio broadcasts of his dance instruction boosted his business prospects. Eventually, he sold dance lessons through mail order and franchised his studios turning his business into a multi-million dollar industry. Throughout his career, teaching his dance methods to famous people like Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and millions of Americans through his mail order and dance studios, Murray came a long way from a shy young immigrant who took up dance just to meet the girls. Murray died of pneumonia in 1991 in Honolulu at the age of 96.

Between 1880 and 1930 over 27 million people entered the United States, but after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, American attitudes toward immigration began to shift. Nationalism and suspicion of foreigners were on the rise, and immigrants’ loyalties were often called into question. Through the early 1920s, a series of laws was passed to limit the flow of immigrants. Today, Ellis Island no longer processes people who want to immigrate to the United States, but the millions of immigrants who were processed through the Island still had their influence on America. Arthur Murray has had a lasting influence in not only places like Atlanta, Georgia, but he has had a lasting influence on all of America.

Today’s immigration laws, like in the 1920s, are still designed to limit the flow of immigrants into the United States. They are much more complicated than they were in those early days of America, but there are still many ways a foreigner can immigrate to the United States, become a permanent resident, or become a citizen. Maybe you have had or know someone who has had a difficult time immigrating to the United States, becoming a permanent resident, or a citizen. If you don’t understand our immigration laws, you want to learn how to immigrate, or you have a relative that wants to immigrate to the United States, you need legal counsel. Even if you already live here and just want to become a permanent resident or citizen, or have a relative that wants to become a permanent resident or citizen of the United States, contact us right now at www.immigrationlawstation.com, and we will help you find an immigration lawyer in your area who will answer any legal questions you may have about immigration law.

Who knows, maybe you, your relative, or someone you know that wants to be a legal resident in the United States will be the next Arthur Murray.