In the Magyar stream the men are nearly three times as numerous as the women and two out of five of the men have left wives in the old country. This means boarding-house life, shocking congestion and a rich harvest for saloon and bawdy house. The Pittsburgh Magyar who earns $1.80 a day will spend ten cents of it for lodging, forty cents for food, and thirty cents for beer. The Magyars are a wine-drinking people and the immigrants come from the farms and know nothing of the corrosion of cities. Being high-spirited, however, they want to become American quickly, with the result that often they acquire our vices before they acquire our virtues. In the mill towns they learn to guzzle beer, carouse and leave their earnings with the caterers to appetite.
Their crime record is bad. No alien is more dreaded by the police than a vengeful or drink-maddened Magyar. The proportion of alien Magyar prisoners who have been committed for murder is 35.6 per cent., higher than of any other nationality save the Russians. Their hot-headed and quarrelsome disposition causes personal violence to bulk very large in their crime. In offenses against chastity their showing is bad, but their bent for gainful crime is slight.
Most Magyars come to America with the expectation of returning eventually to Hungary to live. For this reason few have acquired citizenship and scarcely any immigrants from southeastern Europe show less interest in the ballot. After a trip or two home and a vain effort to settle down to life in the old country, many return to America reconciled, to the prospect of ending their days here.
THE PORTUGUESE
Mongrelism and social decay have hurt the southwest of Europe even more than the Turk has hurt the southeast. This is why the 60,000 Portuguese in the United States are, in point of culture, behind even the Servians and the Macedonians. In the growing army of foreign born illiterates they constitute the van. Not even the Turks, Syrians or East Indians can vie with them. On arrival not a third are able to read and write. As we find them in the cotton mills 55 per cent. of them cannot speak English. Even after ten years or more in our midst two Portuguese out of five cannot manage the speech of the country.
There are two centers of Portuguese distribution—southeastern New England and central California. California has 23,000 Portuguese immigrants, Massachusetts 26,000, Rhode Island 6,000. In Boston are 1,225, in Cambridge 2,000, in Providence 2,200, in Lowell 2,200, in New Bedford 4,000, in Fall River 14,000. We understand why Portuguese should settle in California but what brings these olive-skinned people to chilly New England? The answer takes us into the realm of Chance. In the beginning of a stream of immigration there is often romance. Then, if ever, accident counts and the venturesome individual. Just as a fallen tree on the Continental Divide may turn certain snow waters from the Pacific to the Gulf, so a practice of New Bedford whalers a lifetime ago caused the crowded Azores to overflow into Massachusetts instead of Brazil. In the old days the whalers, after a summer cruise, touched at the Azores and took on each from 25 to 35 natives. When after two or three years of whaling they returned to New Bedford, some of these Azoreans remained and a settlement grew up. To-day their quarter of New Bedford, known as "Fayal," is very prosperous.
Courtesy of The Survey
Croatians Celebrating their Going Home to the "Old Country"