Was migrating way easier back then (e.g., people can just board a ship with their bags to the US and settle there)? What makes migrating to most countries so difficult now?
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In terms of the US immigration policy, there really wasn’t a national policy until the later parts of the 1800s. Before then, states could set their own rules on immigration, but these were pretty hard to enforce in reality. A harbor like Boston or New Orleans had literally thousands of people from all over the world coming and going every week due to trade and commerce alone — to try and keep track of all of these people would have been annoying for both the harbormasters and the merchants and would have been basically logistically impossible anyway. And given that the states all had their own policies, it just took one state saying “yeah, we’ll take anyone” to basically undermine any other state’s attempt to try and keep people out. So for the most part, if you could afford to make the journey to the US you could likely stay and settle — and the government was basically fine with this, as they were always looking for people to move West and settle the interior of the US anyway.
By the late 1800s, steamships and railroads had made reaching the US both much easier (weeks down from months) and more affordable. This was also a particularly tumultuous time in Europe and the pressure to leave was immense. In part due to xenophobic and racist ideologies, the US began trying to centralize and control the process of immigration, and this is when you see Ellis Island and Chinese Exclusion Acts the peak migrations of the early 1900s. The federal government took over and put in place much more control over who could settle.
All of this of course is not counting the border with Mexico, which remained extremely fluid and where the “militarized” nature we see now is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Nowadays? There are a thousand reasons for this but I’ll just lay out the big picture. Migration is so messy now because people have unprecedented access to anywhere in the world via international travel and the internet — someone from as far away as Afghanistan or Nigeria or Venezuela has never had an “easier” time getting to the border of a rich country looking for safety or opportunity or just a chance at a new life (you have Russian political dissidents showing up in Juarez looking to get into the US). At the same time the tools governments have to manage these migrations have never been more powerful — drones, facial recognition, smart phones, etc. Immigration has never been particularly politically popular in most places, but the problems of much of the developing world are extremely dire and the underlying causes of migration are not going away anytime soon, so more people are going to keep coming. So you’re seeing a bit of a unstoppable force meets an immovable object kind of dynamic.
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