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The idealised image of the USA as a land of promise and plenty spans centuries, from the Norse conception of Vinland as a place of wild wheat and vines, where every stream teemed with fish [1], to Baudrillard's "The US is utopia achieved" [2]. This image and the openness to all of the `American Dream' is enshrined in the Statue of Liberty's inscription:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! [3]
If Liberty's torch lit the way, then the doorway itself was Castle Garden or Ellis Island, the New York entry points for arriving emigrants. Seen from Battery Park, Ellis Island can seem remote, and the welcoming lamp of Liberty utterly invisible. This is suggestive of a dichotomy between welcome and regulation, and between openness and restriction. This dichotomy will inform the discussion that follows: prior to 1914 immigration swelled massively - to some 850,000 per year by 1914, and millions were imported through Ellis Island; after 1914 immigration shrank dramatically, and the door was slammed shut - the 1924 figure was 150,000 [4].
Here, I will focus mainly on developments from the 1820s until 1914, since it was in the nineteenth century that immigration expanded exponentially, and the outbreak of the First World War that signalled mass-immigration's curtailment. Firstly, I will discuss the `facts and figures' of immigration - numbers and distributions. Secondly, I will describe some of the influences that shaped US immigration, before finally drawing some conclusions about the importance of the various factors and attempting to sketch a general model of immigration over this period.
The statistics of US population and immigration are relatively uncontentious, despite some uncertainty around the margins of detail. After the Virginia and New England settlements began in the seventeenth century [5], the `new' population of the US grew prodigiously: 2,300 settlers in 1620 became more than 100,000 by 1670, 2.5 million by 1770, 10 million by 1820, and some 100 million by 1914 [6]. This population increase was fuelled primarily by the natural growth component of `native' births [7], but immigration represented an important and seemingly permanent feature of US demography before 1914. Numbers of immigrants expanded during the eighteenth century - totalling some 1.3 million between 1700 and 1820 [8] - and exploded in the nineteenth: between 1820 and 1860 at least 7 million people emigrated to the USA, with a total of 33 million US immigrants between 1821 and 1924 [9].
Immigrants over the nineteenth century were not a uniform group: their origins differed over changing phases of immigration, and the specific circumstances behind their migrations also differed. Two broad phases of immigration can be discerned, `old' and `new' [10]. The `old' immigration consisted largely of British, Irish, Germans and Scandinavians, groups who comprised 82% of US immigrants in the period 1821 - 1890. The `new' immigration was dominated by south, central and east Europeans: Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Italians, Greeks, and Serbs. These `new' immigrants represented 64% of total US immigration in the period 1891 - 1920.
Both old and new immigrants varied by skills, age, and gender, but some general patterns can be sketched. Immigrant demography was concentrated on those in the "prime working years…[who] usually filled the ranks of unskilled labour." [11] In the years before 1880, land-seekers were predominant, whereas after 1880 it was wage-earning job-seekers who became more numerous [12]. In the 1870 - 1914 period, more men than women emigrated to the US, with women in turn dominating after 1916. These patterns perhaps provide some clues to the US's attraction for emigrants before 1914 - work. That the US was immensely attractive is evidenced by the fact that the US received immigrants from more source countries than any other receiver, and by the fact that, numerically, the US received six times as many immigrants as the next highest receiver, Argentina [13]. Even allowing for the US's higher starting point in population size, it is clear that the US was the `destination of choice' for millions and millions of emigrants before 1914. I will now examine some of the reasons for this.
The factors influencing the USA's attractiveness will be discussed here under four headings: `push' factors, facilitative factors, `pull' factors, and inhibitory factors.
The `push' factors which encouraged migrants to depart from their source countries ranged from generalised suffering, uncertainty and misery to highly specific `expulsive' pressures. In the former, general category, I would place the social and economic dislocations wrought by industrialisation in, initially, northern and western Europe, which later also gripped the southern and eastern regions. In this context, changes in agriculture, the process of urbanisation, and the transition from `traditional' to `modern' societies can be cited, with the drift from the land, population increase, and `land famine' being important factors [14]. It is perhaps significant that the world's `first industrial nation', Britain, which was the first to experience the "demographic and technical revolutions that were…transforming the economic and social life of Western Europe" [15] was the biggest single donor of migrants in the period 1846 - 1924 [16].
Another general push factor was the economic cycling of the home countries. When home business cycles bottomed, migration was a more attractive choice: `emigration varied inversely in relation to per capita income' [17]. Also, migration in search of land or work was an established European practice [18].
Country and time-specific factors also acted as migration impellers: for example, the Irish famines of the 1840s, the widespread political repression after the failed revolutions of 1848, and the religious persecutions in Russia where Jewish communities were subjected to violence and expulsions.
Reasons for leaving the source countries were diverse, and were composed of both compulsive and voluntary elements, but it would be fair to say that all such reasons represented - at some level - a calculation (be it purely economic or related to economic well-being and freedom), about where one's best interests or those of one's family lay. In this context, it is possible to speak of emigration being undertaken "overwhelmingly for economic reasons" [19], emigration representing the search for a better condition than that which the migrant found in their own country.
The motivation to migrate is one thing, the ability to migrate is another. I will now discuss some of the facilitative factors which encouraged emigration to the US.
First and foremost must be transport [20], which allowed "long-standing European migration patterns" to spread [21]. Technological developments in rail, road and shipping contributed not only to lowered transport costs, greater carrying capacities and increased geographical coverage, but also to the "expansion of commerce" [22] by which international linkages were enhanced. The effects on migration possibilities were manifold.
Firstly, the European interior was increasingly linked by rail to ports on the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the Atlantic, and thence, by ship to the rest of the world. A great deal of transatlantic trade was in cotton, which meant that considerable space was available on westward voyages of returning cargo ships. The speed and cost of transatlantic travel was further reduced by the introduction of steamships and by competition, such that the Liverpool to New York fare fell from £12 in 1816 to only £3 in 1846 [23].
Improvements in transport and its attendant communications networks also contributed to a second major facilitative element: finance. As well as enabling easier investment in the developing US economy, the transfer of funds by previous emigrants was eased. Remittances from US-based migrants funded approximately 80% of migrant passages across the Atlantic in the late-nineteenth century [24]. Home governments, eager to be rid of excess and potentially burdensome populations also assisted passages, as did US government agencies and US companies: railroad firms, steamship companies, mill-owners and factory proprietors all contributed to fund-raising and encouragement to migrants to gravitate to the land of the free [25].
The advertising campaigns and financial assistance provided by private individuals, companies and government agencies help to explain why the US emerged as the major migrant destination. I will now turn to some of the other `pull' factors which made the US such a magnet.
The first factor is related to why the US government and industrialists were so keen to encourage emigration: the US in the nineteenth century was making great and increasing demands for labour to service its growing economy [26]. Technical advances in industry, agriculture and services fuelled growth, and westward expansion was bringing more and more land into agriculture. The `flipside' of this was that the US economy was seen to offer great economic opportunities to the migrant, especially when compared to what they had left behind. Pace Thomas Malthus, the growing population of the US did not lower wages and living standards. On the contrary, after 1840 increasing inputs of labour, capital accumulation and newly-opened resources brought rising per capita income [27].
For the migrant, the US was indeed a land of opportunity, where labour scarcity provided openings for work in mines, factories, construction, in a host of other unskilled labour spheres, as well as in (fewer) skilled trades and services [28].
The opportunities for work were, for migrants, increasingly in towns and cities, mirroring the trend of US urbanisation, whereby the proportion of the population living in urban areas grew from 5% in 1790 to 40% in 1900 [29]. The conglomeration of migrants in urban areas had an element of self-reinforcement: migrants tended to form enclaves, encouraged to migrate there by their relations and acquaintances who had already crossed the Atlantic, and concentrating around existing migrant communities when they arrived. In 1850, for example, New York had an immigrant population of 46% and Chicago 53%, compared to a national proportion of under 10% [30]. Another related factor was that the drift to the towns provided vast opportunities for unskilled work in the construction of buildings, infrastructure and utilities developments, and in the industries and services which catered for the burgeoning urban population.
In addition to these major pull factors of employment, we should add the less-tangible benefits of relative freedom, greater opportunities to own land and private property, and the promise of `improvement' and the `good life'. It should also be said that the lure of the US was neither universal nor permanent. Repatriation ran at a rate greater than 50% in some periods [31]. The reasons for repatriation varied: some did not like the US, some could not find work, others had earned enough money to be able to return home and live more comfortably, while yet others were `seasonal migrants' who sought work when it was available and returned home when it was finished [32].
A parallel `pull' to this seasonal migration would be the influence of `boom and bust' in the US business cycle as well as the longer-term influences of the Kuznets cycle [33]. There is a demonstrable relationship between the influences of the donor and receiver countries' economic cycles [34].
To summarise, it is evident - if banal to observe - that the attraction of the US to migrants before 1914 was the result of both push and pull factors, mediated by the facilitative factors discussed above. There is another question to be answered: why was 1914 such a watershed, with mass-immigration a commonplace prior to that year, and so much reduced subsequently? It is to this - the unattractiveness or unattainability of the US as a migrant destination after 1914 - and to the inhibitory factors that I will now briefly turn.
The prima facie factor in reducing immigration levels to the US was the First World War, which brought about global dislocations to trade and movement as well as effectively halting the normal peacetime migration of workers. This is clearly of great significance in the short-term curtailment of migration.
However, perhaps more significant is the transition from this ad hoc reduction to the institutionalised reduction that was enforced after the war's end [35].
Immigrants to the US "were not entirely welcome, and got less so as time went on" [36]. Despite government's and business's interest in encouraging immigration of labour, there had always been dissenting voices, and immigrant groups who were persecuted. Irish and German immigrants had been targetted by the `Know-Nothing' movement of the early 1850s [37], and anti-Chinese prejudice had been enshrined in law in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 [38].
By the turn of the century, it was the new immigrants from southern, central and eastern Europe who were being attacked. As well as the traditional xenophobic aspect, there were newer rationalisations of prejudice, based on `scientific' racism and on ideas about biological fitness and eugenics [39]. These found fertile soil in both popular culture and within the administration, the Immigration Commission's 1911 report providing "official support…[for] the ever-more-popular farrago of racist nonsense that was then masquerading as anthropology" [40].
There were social and economic influences at work in supporting the restriction of immigration too: organised labour feared the effects of the cheap `new' labour, and business interests were concerned about the potential for radicalisation of the workforce by the new influx of workers with different labour traditions to those that prevailed in the US [41]. Additionally, immigrants were especially concentrated and visible in the growing cities, where problems of crime, slums, and delinquency were all increasing in scale [42]. These factors all contributed to the immigration restriction legislation passed in 1917, 1921, and 1924, legislation which formalised the reductions already made.
So, what accounts for the attraction of the US for so many migrants before 1914? As outlined above, the growth and diversification of the US economy lay at the heart of many of the `pull' factors that encouraged migrants to travel to the US: labour shortages, plentiful land, expanding industry and growing mass-markets all contributed to the suction effects that pulled in so many millions. These millions themselves fuelled the `transforming machine' of the economy by increasing productivity, urbanisation and output. One can picture a `snowball' effect, where as the economy grows larger it pulls in more factors which encourage its increased momentum and further growth. Thus I would argue that although there are obviously cultural, psychological and political elements to the shaping of the perception of the US as the migrant's `promised land', the core of the attraction was the growing economy's ability to satisfy the - broadly economic - aspirations of the work and land-seeking migrants who came in great waves to its shores. A more speculative conclusion is that once the US had undergone the vast transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the economy's requirement for vast increases of labour inputs faded, with the concomitant that the de facto reductions in immigration could be formalised and easily borne by the economy.
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Bibliography
Atack, Jeremy
and
Passell, Peter - A New Economic View of American History (W. W Norton, 1994)
Baudrillard, Jean - America (Verso, 1989)
Brogan, Hugh - The Pelican History of the USA (Pelican, 1986)
Faith, Nicholas - The World the Railways Made (Pimlico, 1990)
Gould, Stephen Jay - The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican, 1984)
Hobsbawm, Eric - The Age of Capital (Cardinal, 1991)
Kenwood, A. G.
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Lougheed, A. L. - The Growth of the International Economy 1820 - 1990 (Routledge, 1992)
Magnusson, Magnus
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Palson, Hermann - The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Penguin, 1965)
Nugent, Walter - Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations 1870 - 1914 (University of Indiana, 1989)
Temin, Peter - Causal Factors in American Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century (MacMillan, 1975)
Walton, Gary M.
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Rockoff, Hugh - History of the American Economy (Harcourt Brace, 1994)
[1] Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palson (translators), - Eirik's Saga, in The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of (Penguin, 1965), p. 98
[2] Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso, 1989), p. 77
[3] Emma Lazarus, cited in The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Quotations (Bloomsbury, 1989), p. 210
[4] figures from Hugh Brogan, The Pelican History of the USA (Pelican, 1986), p. 512
[5] see Brogan, Chh. 2 - 4
[6] figures in Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History (W. W. Norton, 1994), Ch. 1, passim
[7] see Peter Temin, Causal Factors in American Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century (MacMillan, 1975), p. 12
[8] total derived from Atack and Passell, p. 229
[9] Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations 1870 -1914 (Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 30
[10] for this analysis, and figures, see: Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy (Harcourt Brace, 1994), Ch. 18, passim
[11] ibid., pp. 398 - 402
[12] Nugent, p. 152
[13] ibid., p. 150
[14] see Brogan, pp. 403 417, passim; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (Cardinal, 1991), Ch. 11, passim; A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy 1820 - 1990 (Routledge, 1992), Ch. 3, passim
[15] Kenwood and Lougheed, p. 48
[16] Nugent, p. 30
[17] paraphrase of Atack and Passell, pp. 233 - 4
[18] see Nugent, Ch. 4, passim; Hobsbawm, Ch. 11, passim
[19] Hobsbawm, p. 236
[20] for the following analysis, see Kenwood and Lougheed, p. 52, and Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made (Pimlico, 1990), Part VIII, passim
[21] Nugent, p. 4
[22] Kenwood and Lougheed, p. 52
[23] ibid.
[24] ibid., p. 51
[25] Walton and Rockoff, p. 402
[26] for the following, see Walton and Rockoff, Ch. 18, passim; Kenwood and Lougheed, Ch. 3, passim
[27] see Temin, Ch. 2, passim
[28] Nugent, Ch. 4, passim
[29] Atack and Passell, p. 239
[30] ibid.
[31] Nugent, p. 35
[32] ibid., pp. 35 - 37
[33] Atack and Passell, pp. 233 - 4
[34] ibid.
[35] see p. 2 above for figures
[36] Brogan, p. 413
[37] ibid., pp. 312 -3
[38] see Walton and Rockoff, p. 405
[39] see Brogan, Ch. 17, passim, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Pelican, 1984), passim
[40] Brogan, p. 416
[41] ibid., Ch. 17, passim; Walton and Rockoff, Ch. 18, passim
[42] Walton and Rockoff, p. 402