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Chapter 4 Mass population movements and resettlement, 1820–1924

The rise of modern international migration

Large-scale, transformative social processes framed boundaries within which the age of mass international migration out of Europe occurred after 1820. These processes produced the historical context in which, within a century, the overlying historical purpose of international migration could be realized: societies with too many people and hence an excess of labor exported their surplus population to emergent societies in the Western Hemisphere and Australasia that needed labor. These receiving societies were principally the United States (35 million), Argentina (6 million), Canada (5 million), Brazil (4 million), and Australia (3.5 million), all rich in resources, especially arable land, but lacking population suffi cient to develop them. In 1800, only 4 percent of Europeans were living outside Europe and Russian Siberia; in 1914, by which time about 60 million people over a century had left Europe, approximately 21 percent of Europeans were living outside the continent. The population of the United States would have been only 60 percent of the numbers achieved by 1940 without international migration. It is impossible to overestimate the extent to which that additional 40 percent contributed to making the United States the world’s largest economy.

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EBSCO : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/1/2018 3:54 PM via MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIV AN: 365577 ; Gerber, David A..; American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction Account: s4672406.main.ehost

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Colonialism also spread Europeans throughout the world. Some colonial powers used settler colonies, such as Algeria or Indonesia, to create opportunities for hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, while extending national power. Thus, colonial migrations might supplant voluntary immigration to other sovereign states as a way of dealing with excess population. But speaking for continental Europe as a whole, nothing matched international voluntary emigration as a process for shedding excess population. Possessing the largest empire in the world in the nineteenth century, Great Britain sent millions of military personnel, civil servants, colonial offi cials, and settlers to far-fl ung colonial destinations. Nonetheless, it had the third largest cohort of immigrants to the United States, after Germany and Italy, between 1820 and 1970.

9. Emigrants at Bremerhaven waiting to board ship for America. Bremerhaven was the leading emigration port for Germans, the largest nineteenth-century group to immigrate to America. The port also collected people from all over central and Eastern Europe, who traveled there to fi nd ships sailing to the United States.

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German port

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A fateful demographic transition that began in Europe and would reach the rest of the world in the twentieth century has been at the heart of the rise of modern immigration patterns. After 1750 Europe’s population began a very rapid ascent, fi rst in western Europe and then, by the mid-nineteenth century, in central, southern and eastern Europe. Much of this growth is explained by improvements in diet that were made possible, for example, by the cultivation of the potato, originally a New World crop. Until catastrophic crop failures due to a fungus infection in the 1840s in France, the Netherlands, some of the German states, the Scottish Highlands, and especially Ireland, where a million died of starvation and disease, and almost 2 million were forced to emigrate, the potato was a principal staple of peasant diets.

In addition, long before the antibiotic revolution in medical pharmacology in the mid-twentieth century, improvements in sanitation that included more potable drinking water, better waste disposal, and aseptic child-birthing brought down morality rates. Typically there was no signifi cant expansion in the amount of arable land, so population growth placed pressure on food supplies for the peasant majority, which was engaged in a wide variety of land-owning, leasing, or renting relationships characteristic of European agriculture.

The consequences are seen in patterns of landholding. When inheritance laws and customs favored the eldest son, younger sons found themselves unable to fi nd land at prices that provided opportunity for an independent existence. But where there was partible inheritance, with the passage of generations, many sons found themselves in possession of smaller and smaller holdings that could not sustain existence. The same situation also could be seen in leasing or renting relationships, in which expectations of generational continuity on a given piece of land were disrupted by growing numbers. Even land of no more than marginal value was for sale at escalating prices. Under the circumstances, leaving the land often seemed the only way to survive.

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Lower death rates: Increasing pressure for food resources

Less land available

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That was only one face of the crisis of agriculture. The growth of population and the related rise of people living in the industrial cities encouraged the commercialization of agriculture, through which the cultivation of both food and fi ber, using technology and scientifi c cultivation, was placed on an industrial footing. Peasants were reduced to wage laborers in rural areas, and their customary rights, including long-term lease arrangements, were destroyed.

Key to the process of commercialization was the consolidation of holdings. Extensive cultivation over vast acreage created the basis for signifi cant economies of scale and a vast potential for production and profi t. The traditional patchwork pattern of small holdings, farmed by people often barely making a living for themselves, and the ancient common lands that they shared for grazing work-animals and livestock, were antithetical to capitalist agriculture. Consolidation might be accomplished by increasing rents, outright evictions, or simply declaring that after the death of the current renters, the property would be unavailable for habitation and cultivation. Thus, peasants lost their access to long-term arrangements by which they knew security, and they were reduced to wage labor in the countryside or in the city. Landlords easily grasped the logic of ending small leasing and rental arrangements, increasing rents to new, commercially minded tenants, consolidating arable lands, and enclosing the common fi elds for use in the future of commercial herds.

Some large rural economies outside Europe experienced similar developments in the mid- and late-nineteenth centuries. In Japan after 1867 Emperor Meiji began a wholesale program of industrialization and urban development that encouraged wealthy landowners to consolidate holdings and hence, to remove the peasantry. In southeastern China change was initiated from without, as the European economic penetration of the densely populated valley and delta of the Pearl River placed tremendous pressures on the peasant population. In central Mexico, change came rapidly to the rural heartland of peasant agriculture after

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Commercialization of agriculture

Mexico

Japan

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the completion of railroad lines north to the border cities in the 1890s. In contemplation of the opening of the American and Mexican urban markets to indigenous agriculture, Mexican landholders began consolidating peasant holdings, and created their own great estates of as many as forty thousand acres. Some landowners were content to sell off their increasingly valuable holdings, but while the peasantry went landless, the government of President Porfi rio Diaz sought European commercial farmers to buy these lands, believing that they would achieve greater crop yields, and thus a heartier commercial agriculture, than the sustenance-oriented peasantry.

The response of the peasants to the collapse of accustomed ways of rural life was complex. They might assume traditional forms of resistance, such as riots, arson, nighttime raids, and the murder of commercial herds of sheep or cattle displacing them. Or it might take modern forms, such as rent strikes and law suits orchestrated by well-organized tenants’ unions. But political protests were a diffi cult route, because the peasants were a declining class, acting in desperate circumstances against powerful modernizing social classes that controlled state power in all its most brutal, insidious forms.

More common were nonpolitical, individualized strategies undertaken within the framework of the family. The traditional family, with its patriarchal authority, well-defi ned gender roles, and insistence on the practical contributions of children effectively mobilized for common endeavor and mutual support. Younger children might be sent off to be laborers and servants. Marriage might be postponed to later ages, as in Japan and Ireland, to shorten the period of the young couple’s independence and simultaneously lowering births by truncating the period of marital fertility. Family forms might be changed, too. In the European countryside, more complicated family arrangements—for example, stem families in which one son and his family might live with his parents, or joint families, in which all sons and their

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Reaction and survival strategies

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families lived with parents—arose for the purpose of consolidating labor, living cheaply in a common household, and meeting the challenge of paying higher rents.

Another option was migration, whether long-distance or short-distance. A high degree of transiency, especially among the young, came to characterize the peasantry. In many places, transiency had been a routine feature of the peasant economy for centuries. Younger men in particular traveled to get work, for example, helping with harvests. But, as modernizing transformations gathered force, many more people engaged in short-distance migrations, which became less about supplementing income and more about survival. Seasonal transiency might expand to encompass a larger portion of the year, as among those Scottish Highlanders who were in jeopardy of losing their leases because of the massive extension of commercial sheep farming. Some of these Scots or their sons now went to the fi sheries nearly the entire year: in the winter they worked with white fi sh, in the spring herring in western waters, and in the summer herring in eastern waters. Nearby migrations in search of work as laborers in the new proletarianized, commercial agriculture grew common.

Exerting a more powerful pull was the vast labor market of the industrial economy in the growing cities, where technology and entrepreneurship had merged, fi rst in textiles, to create mass production on a scale previously unimaginable. The new factory system, with its low-priced goods, simultaneously undercut the competitive position of village and town artisans and craftsmen, whose livelihoods were also imperiled by the problems that plagued their largest market, the peasantry. In consequence, traditional skilled workers joined the growing stream of migrants to cities.

It was bad enough, from his perspective, for the shoemaker to tend a machine in a shoe factory. For many peasants, a permanent

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Migration as survival strategy

“Pull” factor of cities

Making money in factories

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descent into wage earning could only be confronted with horror. They measured value by the possession of land, whether as owners or renters, and strove to be as independent as possible in the production of the means for their survival. For peasants and traditional craftsmen to end up living the proletarian life of a wage earner in the slums of industrial cities was a miserable fate. Many millions did end up that way; without them, there would have been no European industrial revolution. Although it is diffi cult to know the numbers involved, rural and village folk who came to regional industrial centers might well have been engaged in step-migrations, using the wages made in factory work to fi nance international migration.

International migration was a strategy for avoiding proletarianization and might fi ll multiple practical needs: permanent resettlement; temporary work abroad while earning money to be brought back to the homeland to ensure stability in the new economy; and earning money to provide remittances sent to family at home. The extent of these remittances sent from the United States was impressive. Between 1870 and 1914, in the currency values of the day, Slovaks sent approximately $200 million home, while between 1897 and 1902 Italians sent $100 million, and between 1906 and 1930 Swedes sent $192 million. The volume of Greek remittances grew annually between 1910 and 1920 from $4.675 million to $110 million.

International migration was best considered not by the very poor, for whom it was prohibitively expensive, or by the affl uent, who did not have to emigrate, but by the middle and lower-middle ranks of rural, village, and town society. They possessed the material resources to emigrate, such as fare for ships’ passage and funds to aid in resettlement, but also the nonmaterial cultural capital, chief among which was literacy. This is not to say the very poor were always absent from the ranks of emigrants. Though not the poorest of their singularly immiserated society, the approximately 1.7 million Irish immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s

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Sending money back home

What socio-economic groups migrated?

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who were victims of the potato famine were uniquely impoverished as a cohort among immigrants to the United States. Moreover, as the price of the cheapest passage declined with the coming of steamships, it became economical for poorer people to emigrate.

But understanding of the consequences of poverty must be further contextualized in the later epoch. In contrast to the situation of the resettlement of the Potato Famine Irish, who were the fi rst generation of mass Irish Catholic emigration, by the later nineteenth century many of these poorer immigrants were members of transnational mutual support networks that bound them to family and friends already in the United States. Practical support, which might include small sums of money as well as lodging and a pre-arranged job, often compensated for lack of funds on arrival.

In the nineteenth century, when cheap, accessible land was plentiful, immigrants could dream of replicating the old way of life in the newly emerging states of the Middle West and Great Plains, where the fl at prairie lands were known for remarkable fertility. Husbands and wives, with young children, in search of farmsteads were especially prominent among mid-nineteenth century Germans and Scandinavians. There were single male migrants, too, both farmers and artisans, who hoped to stay for a year or two and make enough money to return home to start families and be independent on their own land. They might work in mills, factories, or mines, even if they would not take such work in Europe. American wages were higher, and there was less reason to fear being trapped, if one had the means for returning home. Others worked in American mills in the hope of raising the capital to start farms in the United States and achieve independence of the wage economy.

Skilled workers in infant American industries were also present among the nineteenth-century immigrants, for capitalists could

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Pull factor: Germans, Norwegians &Swedes before 1890

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not yet fi nd among Americans the knowledge needed to operate new industrial technologies that had emerged in Europe. In the pioneering phase of development in a number of industries, the importation of skilled Europeans, lured by very high wages, was essential to achieving progress. This was the case, for example, in brewing throughout the northern states and in winemaking in the Ohio Valley, both of which depended on German craftsmen, and in pottery, textiles, and stone quarrying and cutting in which British craftsmen proved essential.

Such migrations were targeted geographically, and, if continued over time, might lead to a virtual international integration of local labor forces. For many years, for example, the sandstone quarrying and cutting industry in northwestern New York State depended partly on the importation of skilled English workers who had been employed in the same industry in Yorkshire’s southern Pennine fringe. From the 1820s well into the twentieth century, English cutters and quarrymen, who had been workmates

10. Ole Myrvik’s Sod House, Milton, North Dakota, 1896. Scandinavian immigrants and their American-born children were among the pioneers settling in the American Great Plains after the Civil War. Both Ole Myrvik and his unnamed wife were children of Norwegian immigrant parents.

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Norwegian

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in their homelands and were introduced to their American employers by those English workers who preceded them, were migrating to work Medina sandstone in Niagara and Orleans counties. They initiated transnational employment circuits, which, in effect, simultaneously embedded them in two societies. Even in the age of sailing vessels, some migrated seasonally. They returned to Britain to divide their time between attending to small farms and quarrying and cutting at their old jobs. They might reappear to take up jobs in New York State periodically after an absence of a few years when they discovered that wages had become advantageous. Some married American women, or brought wives from England. After 1900, new immigrant Italians and Poles joined them in the quarries

The changing character of European immigration

The decline after 1890 in the reserves of arable American land that might be conveniently approached from the principal East Coast immigrant-receiving ports, the subsequent rise in the price of farm making, and the tremendous growth of mass production industries altered the character of the immigration. The demographic balance of international migration increasingly shifted from young families to single men in search in urban employment. A significant percentage of them aspired to work as long as it took in order to make enough money to return to their homelands and achieve a greater measure of independence. Men predominated two to one over women, except among the Irish. While in the international migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women were mostly wives, mothers, and daughters arriving in family groups, the situation was different among the Irish. In Ireland women had few opportunities. Marriage was being postponed later and later, or had become impossible, as available farm land declined. But Irish women did well in American job markets, especially as domestics, because they spoke English. By the 1870s, only some 15 percent of the Irish

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Who the immigrants were

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emigration was composed of families. Irish men and women were just about equal in immigration streams to the United States between 1869 and 1920, although women outnumbered men in approximately half of those years.

The decades after 1890 were peak years for the European “birds of passage”—male transients who took advantage of transoceanic steamships to commute between their homelands and the United States. Italians were among the most transient immigrant peoples. Italian construction and agricultural laborers and railroad track maintenance workers moved routinely among the United States, Argentina, or Brazil, and their homelands. Among British workers, building artisans regularly worked both sides of the Atlantic. The principal infl uence of such immigrant workers was to integrate labor markets on both sides of the Atlantic.

The birds of passage must be distinguished from those noncommuting migrants who arrived with the intention of making money and leaving once and for all to fulfi ll aspirations in their homelands. Perhaps a quarter of those entering the United States re-emigrated. During 1908–23, approximately 89 percent of Bulgarians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, 66 percent of Romanians and Hungarians, and 60 percent of southern Italians returned to Europe. Among peoples who had little to return to because of a lack of opportunities, such as the Irish (11 percent) or because of persecution, such as the eastern European Jews (5 percent), re-emigrants were far fewer.

Nonetheless 75 percent stayed. Some men had always planned to send for their families, if they could fi nd a promising situation. Others gradually came to the conclusion that they would be better off breaking with the past. Nonetheless, though a minority, Europeans who re-emigrated had a strong infl uence on the discourse of American immigration restrictionists. They sent money home rather than spend it to the benefi t of American

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commerce. They had no desire to assimilate. The labor unions saw them as willing tools of the employers, impossible to organize.

A different picture emerged on the Pacific Coast of the United States. In these more recently settled states arable land was still available. Young Japanese immigrant families sought farmland in rural California, Washington, and Oregon. Young South Asian men from the Punjab came to the Imperial Valley of California, where large fruit and vegetable farms were being carved out of the desert in consequence of massive irrigation projects, to work as agricultural labor. Many hoped to get the money to buy small farms and form families, as some did with Mexican women, starting a unique Punjabi-Mexican hybrid ethnicity. In contrast, Mexicans displaced by consolidation of peasant landholdings by landlords first became a local agrarian proletariat, or went to work in factories and mines in northern Mexico where wages were higher than in agriculture. But spurred by the promise of even higher wages and eventually threatened by revolutionary violence, after 1900 they began entering the United States in growing numbers, across an open border, to find work in mining and agriculture in the American West.

To the casual observer mass immigration and resettlement may seem chaotic and even menacingly disorderly. But this is rarely the perception of immigrants, whose strategies for accomplishing relocation across oceans and continents have been heavily dependent on paths laid down by those often familiar individuals who came before them. Every immigration has its pioneers, whose narratives of exploration and discovery make compelling reading. But once these pioneers lay down tracks known to their families, friends, and former neighbors, even the most massive immigrant fl ows take on a routine, predictable character. That is the mark of the immigrant’s creativity in living: in the midst of life-changing movements across vast distances, they have been guided by strategies that minimize risks and extend the realm of the familiar.

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Japanese

Mexican

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People hoping to improve themselves by pursuing work across international space have always been a highly selective group. Hard work, high aspirations, and family and group solidarity are characteristic of immigrant groups, and provide substantial resources in the struggle to make new homes.

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