THE ALIEN INVASION
The period 1860-1930, with which we are now dealing, is characterized by the end of free public land in the West about 1880. It is also marked by the great development of industries in the North and East, which created a demand for cheap labor, and attracted a mass immigration of non-British and non-Nordic workmen from southern and eastern Europe. This immigration for the most part went to the cities and industrial districts.
The Southern States, which had not entered upon an industrial expansion before the Civil War, did not welcome immigrants of the low-grade factory type, hence the South has remained characteristically American. One of the strange results of the Civil War has been that while the victorious North sold its birthright of culture, religion, and racial purity for a mess of industrial pottage, the South, though defeated and impoverished, retained its racial inheritance unimpaired.
Some of the earlier immigrants in this period sought the lands in the West, while they were still to be had. The land hunger having carried most of the energetic, ambitious, and able Nordic immigrants westward, the industrial expansion of New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and of some of the adjacent States resulted in an unfilled demand for low-grade factory labor in the East. This demand was quickly recognized by the steamship companies, which began scouring Europe for immigrants to transport to America.
The most fertile recruiting ground for this type of humanity was in South Europe, Italy, the Balkan countries, and the provinces of the then Austrian Empire and Russia. Inducements were offered potential immigrants to come to America. There was no discrimination as to type or quality. Many criminals were rounded up, especially in southern Italy and Sicily, with the connivance if not the actual initiative of their governments.
As to the ratio of criminals to the native American population, some interesting figures have been compiled through a first-hand survey of 242 State and federal prisons in the United States during 1931-32. Most of the criminals referred to were committed for serious offenses. The criminals from northwestern Europe were well under (sometimes only one-quarter) their ratio to the general population. South Europe and eastern Europe were very much higher. The Filipinos were over twice as many as the proper allowance, native-born Negroes were two-and three-quarters above their allowance and the Mexicans were six and one-half times as many as their ratio to the general population would entitle them to be.
It was in this period that the Polish Jews began their tumultuous and frantic invasion, a flood which only recently has been checked, and that with the greatest difficulty. The great mass of immigrants from South Poland, Galicia, and Russia were Ashkanazim Jews, descendants in part of Alpine Khozars, with a Mongol admixture, who entered the eastern Ukraine from Asia in the early centuries of our era. Many of the Khozars and their Khan were converted by Jewish missionaries and they formally accepted Judaism in 740 A.D. It is doubtful whether there is a single drop of the old Palestinian, Semitic-speaking Hebrew blood among these East European Jews. They are essentially a non-European people. The language they speak, Jüdisch, or Yiddish, is a corrupt German of the Franconian dialect mixed with Slavic and Hebrew elements, which fact strengthens the tradition of a large migration of German Jews into Poland in the Middle Ages. It may be that the strain of these German Jews has died out, leaving only their language behind, but in any event the Polish Jews are now distinctly Alpine—a mixture of Slavs and of Asiatic invaders of Russia.
Exact figures of Jewish immigration are not obtainable until 1899, when this group was listed separately. Prior to that year probably 500,000 Jews had arrived; after that date nearly 2,000,000. From the beginning of this century the Jews made up 10 per cent of the total immigration into this country, and there are now more than 4,000,000 of them here, half of the number being in New York City. This is more than one-fifth of the Jews of the world.
Because they speak Yiddish, they are often colloquially referred to as "German Jews." But, in fact, the number who come from Germany is small, and, as said, the great bulk of them are more properly described as "Polish Jews" and are much despised socially by the true German Jews. Many of them are from those parts of Poland which were held by Russia prior to the World War. Immigration figures show the last place of residence of Jewish arrivals, 1899-1924, to be as follows: