The Causes of Immigration
The causes of immigration are variously stated, but compressed into three words they are: Attraction, Expulsion, Solicitation. The attraction comes from the United States, the expulsion from the Old World, and the solicitation from the great transportation lines and their emissaries. Sometimes one cause is more potent, sometimes another. Of late, racial and religious persecution has been active in Europe, and America gets the results. "In Russia there is an outbreak, hideous and savage, against the Jew, and an impulse is started whose end is not Expulsionreached until you strike Rivington Street in the ghetto of New York. The work begun in Russia ends in the seventeenth ward of New York." Cause and effect are manifest. Military service is enforced in Italy; taxes rise, overpopulation crowds, poverty pinches. As a result, the stream flows toward America, where there is no military service and no tax, and where steady work and high wages seem assured.Attraction The mighty magnet is the attractiveness of America, real or pictured. America is the magic word throughout all Europe. No hamlet so remote that the name has not penetrated its peasant obscurity. America means two things—money and liberty—the two things which the European peasant (and often prince as well) lacks and wants. Necessity at home pushes; opportunity in America pulls. Commissioner Robert Watchorn, of the port of New York, packs the explanation into an epigram: "American wages are the honey-pot that brings the alien flies." He says further: "If a steel mill were to start in a Mississippi swamp paying wages of $2 a day, the news would hum through foreign lands in a month, and that swamp would become a beehive of humanity and industry in an incredibly short space of time." Dr. A. F. Schauffler says, with equal pith, that "the great cause of immigration is, after all, that the immigrants propose to better themselves in this country. They come here not because they love us, or because we love them. They come here because they can do themselves good, not because they can do us good."[6] That is natural and true; and it furnishes excellent reason why we must do them good in order that they may not do us evil. To make their good ours and our good theirs is both Christian and safe.
Three ClassesThe three causes produce three classes of immigrants: 1. Natural; 2. Assisted; and 3. Solicited.
Normal Motives and Conditions
The prosperity of this country has undoubtedly chiefly influenced immigration in the past. This is shown by the marked relationship between industrial and commercial activity in the United States and the volume of immigration.[7] Our prosperity not only induces desire to come but makes coming possible. The testimony before the Industrial Commission showed that from forty to forty-five per cent. of the immigrants have their passage prepaid by friends or relatives in this country, and from ten to twenty-five per cent. more buy their tickets abroad with money sent from the United States. In 1902 between $65,000,000 and $70,000,000 was sent home to Italy alone from the United States, and the stream of earnings flowing out to Ireland and Germany and Sweden and Hungary has been not less steady. American prosperity has been feeding and paying taxes for millions of people who owe far more to our government than to their own, and foreign governments have been reaping the benefit. The United States has a small standing army of its own, but through the gold sent abroad by the alien wage earners here we have been helping maintain the vast armaments of Europe. The letters and the money sent by immigrants to the home folks awaken the desires and dreams that mean more immigrants. The United States Post-office is a marvelous immigration agent in Europe. Immigrants are not the only persons induced to migrate through the feeling that where one is not will prove a much better place than where one is. That seems to inhere in human nature.
American Leaven
"Not only the American money and letters, but the American ideas are at work abroad," says the Rev. F. M. Goodchild, D.D.,[8] in a recent address: "The praises of America are told abroad by every person who comes here and gets along. Some things to be sure, these people miss—the blue skies of Italy and the vineyards on the hillside. But they have for them the compensation of such a liberty as they never knew before. The real reason why all southern Europe is in a turmoil to-day, is that American ideas of liberty are working there like leaven. We get our notions of liberty from the Bible and from the men who forced the Magna Charta from King John at Runnymede, but all other peoples in the world seem to be getting their ideas of liberty from us. That is what is the matter with the Old World to-day.The American Idea The American idea is working like leaven. That is the force at work in France, where absolute divorce has just been proclaimed between Church and State. That is at the bottom of the movements in Russia, where the Stundists have just won religious liberty, and where, let us hope, all classes of people ere long will have won complete civil liberty. These people have felt the uplift of our American free institutions and they want them for themselves. They have heard 'Yankee Doodle,' and the 'Star Spangled Banner,' and 'My Country, 'tis of Thee,' and they cannot get the music of liberty out of their ears and their hearts. Broughton Brandenburg tells us that he heard some Italians who had been in America singing our classic song 'Mr. Dooley' in the vineyards near Naples."