Americans by Choice

by John Palmer Gavit

FACTORS IN IMMIGRATION

The alien does not come with any direct interest in citizenship. He comes to improve his status. And this motive has two aspects; the impulse is twofold—a push from behind and a pull from in front, sometimes one, usually both. The statistics displaying the fluctuations of what Prof. Frank J. Warne calls “The Tide of Immigration” are luminous in their reflection of this purely human fact. In order to see it stand forth, one must keep it vividly in mind that these tables of statistics are not mere exhibits of mathematical digits, but lists of human beings, inspired by motives precisely like our own. The 148,093 subjects of His Britannic Majesty—mostly Irish—who came to America in 1848 were, each of them, a specific individual human soul, impelled by the fact that the potato famine, or whatnot else at home, interfered with the adequacy of his meals; and attracted by the belief that he would find things better in America. The one lone Russian recorded in that year presumably represented precisely the same interplay of motives. The heavy German immigration in 1852, 1853, and 1854 was made up of men, women, and children who found conditions intolerable because of the repressions ensuing upon the revolutionary movement of ’48. And so on. On the other hand, the shrinkages in the figures in various later periods, in a general way, coincide with the times of industrial depression, unemployment, etc., in this country; things were not so attractive here as to offer substantial improvement upon the situation at home.

The six sources whence we have derived the bulk of our new population are Great Britain and Ireland; the three Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia—in the seventy-eight years from 1840 down to and including 1918, when immigration virtually stopped owing to the conditions created by the World War. Immigration since then has been subject to influences so different from those prevailing before, and as yet so little understood, that intelligent comparisons would be perilous.[7]

Students of immigration have usually built their generalizations upon totals of inflow, frequently overlooking the striking disparity of time and numbers among the various racial groups. Yet there is much significance in this disparity. Professor Warne, for example, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (1920), in an analysis generally of the upward and downward curves of immigration from all countries during the century since 1820, says:

By studying the yearly figures ... and relating them to events of industrial or economic history, we are able to understand what is probably the most significant of all the operating forces or influences at work behind this great movement of population across the Atlantic. For illustration, the number of immigrant arrivals strikingly decreased from nearly 482,000 in 1854 to 200,877 the following year, a decrease of more than one-half. This falling off reflected the effects of the greatest financial panic ever experienced in the United States up to that time.

Well enough for a generalization based on totals; but it is not to be overlooked that at that very point the then comparatively small immigration from Italy more than doubled between 1853 and 1854, jumping from 535 to 1,263, and remained above 1,000 with the exception of one year, until 1860. Again Professor Warne:

The ensuing industrial depression was followed closely by the Civil War, and it was not until 1873 that the yearly inflow again reached as large a volume, the number being nearly 460,000.

But it was precisely during the hottest and most critical years of the Civil War that German immigration increased. It had been relatively low between 1854 and 1865 (in which latter year it was 58,153), but jumped in 1866 to 120,218, and (with the exception of 1871, when it fell to 82,554) remained high until and including 1873, when it almost touched 150,000. It would seem that something must have been going on in Germany to drive these people out against the adverse economic conditions prevailing here.

The year 1873 [continues Professor Warne] marks another panic, and a striking decrease the following years in the number of alien arrivals is again recorded.

But the Austrian, Italian, and Russian immigration, which had been relatively insignificant up to 1869 and 1870, was higher in 1870–75 than ever before, and with minor ups and downs increased more or less steadily up to the very high figures of the past two decades, which gave rise to the widely believed legend entitled, “The New Immigration.”

The question of means of livelihood, of a better job, is doubtless the chief factor, but it is not the only factor. Any job at all in a free country is better, for any man worth his salt, than a far better-paid job under conditions of oppression. The man who leaves his homeland to adventure even under adverse conditions, because he cannot tolerate political tyranny, used to be regarded per se as fit for American citizenship. He is still fit, even though he belong to the traditional “New Immigration”; even though of late we have tended rather to discourage the idea that personal liberty is valuable in and of itself. It is still true that along with our fame as a land where economic opportunity is to be found, the men and women of other lands are attracted by what they still believe to be our atmosphere of liberty.