1

Overseas Migration from Europe

Migration is a fundamental human activity. The very first person of whom we are aware—that African Eve whom her discoverer, Donald Johanson, decided to call Lucy—was in the process of moving (migrating or returning “home”?) as her footprints, still legible after three million years, show.1 In the ensuing millennia her descendants settled, somehow, every continent save Antarctica. The New World, last to be settled, was apparently uninhabited by man until some thirty thousand years ago, when Asian migrants crossed the then-existing land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and deployed throughout the two Americas, creating cultures of great variety and complexity. To cite but one example of that variety, consider the Inuit, one of the native peoples of Canada’s Arctic regions. (Americans tend to call them Eskimos.) Though the Inuit number but several thousand, their two language families, specialists assure us, are as dissimilar as English and Russian.

In any event, by prehistoric times, the human race had peopled almost the entire globe by migration. In historic times we make a distinction between the term migration, which simply means moving, and immigration which means moving across national frontier. If we posit two unemployed auto workers in Detroit leaving the motor city to seek a job elsewhere—one of them taking a trolley across the bridge to Windsor, Ontario, and the other flying to San Diego—only the first is immigrating even though his is the shorter journey. Thus an immigrant is simply a migrant whose move has involved crossing at least one international frontier.

The struggle to impose global European hegemony began after the voyages of Columbus and others in the so-called Age of Discovery (“so-called” because everywhere Europeans went they found people there before them). In the course of that struggle Europeans’ attitudes toward the peoples of the rest of the world changed. That change can most easily be seen by comparing the notions of one of the earlier European travelers, Marco Polo (1254?–1324?), with those of his successors. His famous book about his travels to China is written from the perspective of a person from a relatively underdeveloped region who has visited a more-developed one. Two centuries later, however, in the Age of Discovery, the attitudes of Europeans were quite different. Not only did they arrogantly assume their own superiority, but they also disregarded the legitimacy of the civilizations and cultures they encountered. Although still ready, like Marco Polo, to report wonders, and often capable of believing almost anything, European travelers in the new age exhibited an almost universal self-confidence of the superiority of their own culture. Europeans as different as Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and John Winthrop (1588–1649) justified their usurpations as promoting the greater glory of God and/or empire. Similarly, the great Portuguese poet Luis de Camoëns (1524–80), who had himself been in India and China, begins his epic, The Lusiads (1572):

                This is the story of Heroes who, leaving their native

                Portugal behind them, opened a way to Ceylon and

                farther, across seas no man had ever sailed before. . . .

                It is a story, too, of a line of kings who kept

                advancing the boundaries of faith and reason.

Scholars disagree about the reasons for this confidence: Some ascribe it to European culture generally, others to Christianity, and still others to technology. One of my own teachers, the late Lynn White, Jr., ascribed it to a combination of religion and technology.2 But, whatever the reasons, the growth of the notion of European superiority is quite clear.

Most Europeans also assumed that they and their stock were inherently superior to the various peoples they subjugated. With some notable exceptions, Europeans had a contempt for the cultures and peoples they encountered, an attitude that would soon evolve into modern racism. We who write of the triumphs of modern immigration to America must never forget the societies and peoples whom the newcomers conquered and sometimes exterminated. Although few contemporary writers are quite as crude as Theodore Roosevelt—in his vivid Winning of the West (1889–96) he could complain that the British Proclamation Line of 1763 was an attempt to keep “two thirds of a splendid continent as a hunting preserve for squalid savages”—too many historians of America still write as if the New World before the coming of the whites had been a tabula rasa or a virgin land for them to conquer and manipulate as they would. This theme, explicitly or implicitly, is dominant in most of the writing about what one Eurocentric historian called the “transit of civilization from the Old World to the New.”3 From John Winthrop’s Journal (1630–44), through Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis (1893), to Bernard Bailyn’s Voyages to the West (1987), the theme of “an errand into the wilderness” or of “peopling” an empty land has dominated the discussion of the first centuries of modern immigration to America.

Faith and empire were, as Camoëns noted, prime forces in the process of European migration overseas, but so too was the desire for economic gain. From an imperial point of view—one that will be largely ignored in this book, which is focused on the experience of the human beings who came—the settlement of America north of Mexico was essentially a failure, an investment whose bottom line was written in red ink. No single fact illustrates this better than the willingness of some British policymakers during the negotiations preceding the Treaty of Paris of 1763 to take the profitable sugar island of Martinique (385 square miles) instead of all of Canada as spoils of war. Individuals, of course, did make money even out of North America. But whether they succeeded or failed, all the European powers who were engaged in colonization hoped to profit, either from primitive accumulation—stealing already mined precious metals and jewels from their owners, such as Aztec and Inca rulers—mining, or procuring low-bulk, high-value exports such as spices and furs for which there was an established market in Europe. In the New World the most prized exports in the period before 1800 were gold, silver, sugar, and furs. Only the last was found in North America in that period; the first of the many North American gold rushes did not begin until 1849.

The several hundred thousand Europeans who came to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came largely because of what we would now call the population and/or labor policies developed by the various colonizing powers. These policies were shaped both by the existing socioeconomic conditions in the home countries and by the opportunities for gain, real and imagined, that existed in the new colonies. While Anglo-American writers since at least the late sixteenth century have stressed the so-called “black legend”—the special cruelty exhibited by Spaniards—the modern social historian finds no moral difference between the ways that the European nations behaved in the New World. Conquistadores hacking their way to riches through walls of human flesh are no more—or less—morally reprehensible than Puritan fathers rejoicing at the deaths of Indians from European diseases. John Winthrop, for example, wrote in 1634 that “the natives, they are neare all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” And, as Alfred Crosby has shown, European and African diseases to which the Amerindians had little or no natural immunity killed many more of them than did European bullets and blades, while the destruction of their culture may have caused even more fatalities.4

image

The numbers of deaths involved are staggering even though the experts’ guesses vary wildly. The Argentinean scholar Angel Rosenblatt estimated in 1954 that the pre-Columbian population of the Americans had been about 13.3 million and that eight decades of conquest reduced this to some 10.8 million, a reduction of nearly 20 percent. More dramatic—and much more controversial—are the calculations of a group of historians at the University of California, Berkeley. For the central plateau of Mexico alone, these scholars have calculated from 1519 (the date of Cortés’s arrival) a population decline as follows:

Table 1.1

“Berkeley School” Estimates of Central Mexican Population, 1519–1605

1519

25,200,000

1532

16,800,000

1548

6,300,000

1568

2,650,000

1580

1,900,000

1595

1,375,000

1605

1,075,000

If these figures even approximate what happened, the peoples of Central Mexico suffered one of the worst demographic disasters in human history. Even critics of the Berkeley school agree that its figures from 1568 on are probably good approximations: These show a decline of about 60 percent—about a million and a half human beings—in two generations. North of the Rio Grande the numbers are smaller, but here too the experts’ investigations are constantly raising the total. When I was in graduate school in the late 1950s, “about a million” was an acceptable answer to the question, How many Indians lived in what is now the United States and Canada in 1492? Today an answer of “about two and a half or three million” would be acceptable.5

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all Amerindians suffered equally or at all from the white invasion. The mounted Indians of the Great Plains, who because of Hollywood Westerns seem to be the archetypical North American Indians, had a way of life totally dependent on contributions taken from the whites: the horse and the gun. The Navajo, one of the few success stories in Amerindian demography, have grown from perhaps eight thousand in 1680 to some one hundred fifty thousand today. The continuing and changing relationships between Amerindians and whites, and sometimes between Amerindians and blacks, are ignored in most American histories, except to record the occasional battle or massacre. The first such battle—really a skirmish—is described in the Icelandic Eddas. The Viking colonists in North America—who called the Indians skrellings—had no overwhelming superiority in weaponry, so the result was essentially a standoff, although successful Indian opposition was clearly a factor in the Viking abandonment of America. But other kinds of relationships with later settlers were more significant, relationships symbolized by two almost-mythological real persons, Pocahontas and Squanto, each a lifesaver or sustainer. This supportive role was repeated, if less dramatically, in each area of settlement as the first newcomers learned survival techniques from those who had lived there for generations. Similarly, each increment of newcomers learned survival techniques from those already there, whether on the “wild” frontier or on the urban and suburban ones. But the newcomers, although learning from observation if in no other way, did not melt into the existing society any more than the Pilgrims became Indians.

Historians of America and American ethnic groups are all too ready to ignore the preexisting cultures and groups as they recount their version of life in the New World. Whether one is talking about the sixteenth century or the twentieth, few metaphors are more inappropriate than the one of the melting pot. Canadians have recently adopted a more satisfactory metaphor for their society, calling it a mosaic, in which groups tend to retain certain characteristics yet at the same time become Canadian.

This problem of identity has been a serious one since our earliest history and also troubles other “settler societies,” particularly as long as they continue to receive significant numbers of additional immigrants. The more uniform the immigration and the more closely it corresponds in ethnicity, nationality, culture, and class to the existing society, the less severe the identity problem is likely to be. But even in relatively homogeneous settler societies such problems do exist. Scholars have recently described the problem of colonial identity as follows: “The process by which colonizing groups come to perceive themselves as a people distinct both from those resident in their country of origin and from those indigenous to their place of settlement.” In Spanish-American colonial society, for example, where there were few ethnic differences within the colonizing population, the crucial distinction soon came to be that between peninsulares, those born in Iberia, and “creoles,” those born in the New World. Similar distinctions were made elsewhere in the European colonial world.6 In addition, in all colonial societies, distinctions are made between the colonizers and the colonized.

In the New World all the colonizing powers had to develop population-labor policies, policies which differed greatly between nations and often within the colonies of one nation. The differences between the policies of the three chief colonizing powers in the New World—Spain, France, and England—are to be explained by objective circumstances, not national character. (The best evidence for this is the virtually identical policies each—along with the Dutch and the Danes—adopted on their separate Caribbean islands.)

Spain found what all colonizers wanted: instant riches. As Cortés fancifully explained to Montezuma: “We Spaniards have a disease of the heart which only gold can cure.” Once they had confiscated the already gathered treasure, the colonizers set about exploiting established mines and finding new ones. Thus they needed large amounts of labor. For this they first levied local Indian populations and then, probably because of declining Indian numbers, they began to import slaves from Africa. (Some historians have held that Bartolomé de las Casas [1474–1566], the Dominican “Apostle to the Indians,” encouraged or even caused the introduction of Negro slavery to spare his beloved Indians, but most recent authorities deny this.) Spanish society thus became triracial. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, perhaps half a million peninsulares came to the New World, not very many people for nearly three centuries, especially considering the extent of Spanish dominion and the number of persons to be governed. In addition many quickly returned, and the mortality rates in the colonies were quite high. Add to this a very heavily male immigration and the extensive sexual relationships that existed between conquering males and subordinate females, and it is easy to understand why Spanish colonial society quickly found a place for persons of mixed ancestry, or mestizos. This was especially true if those persons were acculturated, more or less, to European standards in language, dress, diet, and so on. And although language and law soon developed terms for all of the mixtures possible in a triracial society, practice soon defined most such persons by culture rather than by ancestry. Thus, an individual who spoke Spanish, wore European clothes, and ate European style food was considered, if not Spanish, not any longer an Indian. Such mestizos were crucial in helping to administer the empire.

In New France (Canada) an entirely different situation prevailed. French immigration was heavily male but much smaller than that from Spain: perhaps forty thousand persons at most during the colonial period. Since the fur trade was the key to wealth in New France, the fur traders, or coureurs de bois, became, after the soldiers and the priests, the most vital individuals. Unlike the Spaniards, who exacted various kinds of forced labor from Indians, the French wanted the Indians to become even more proficient at one of their traditional occupations: fur trapping. To this end they supplied them with tools to make them more efficient: metal traps and rifles. The Spanish policy forbade Indians, culturally defined, either to bear modern arms or ride horses, on pain of death. On the northern borders of Mexico, however, some horses—which, according to tradition, came initially from the expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1510?–1554)—escaped, found the environment to their liking, and multiplied. The Indians of northern Mexico and what is now the American Southwest soon captured some and learned how to ride, creating what anthropologists call the “horse and no gun culture.” Meanwhile, on the swampy plains and forests of Canada, as noted, Indians were developing the “gun and no horse” culture. (The French would have supplied horses had they been useful, but trappers in eastern Canada needed canoes, not horses.) Eventually each culture expanded until they met, producing the previously mentioned “horse and gun” culture of the Plains Indians, whose great war/sport was the stealing of horses.

At the same time small settlements of French families settled in the Saint Lawrence Valley in what are now Quebec, eastern Ontario, and the Maritimes and tried to scratch out a living from relatively poor soil and a short growing season. Starting in the last third of the nineteenth century, descendants of these Quebecois would migrate to the United States in large numbers, as will be seen in chapter 9.

Unlike the Spaniards and the French, the English had no long-term use for the Indians. Although, the English, too, wished quick riches, agriculture and fishing quickly became their chief economic activities. As late as 1790, the first census showed that 95 percent of all Americans lived on farms, and only in 1920 would it record an “urban” majority: That is, just over half the population lived in places of 2,500 or more persons. As Richard Hofstadter put it, the United States was born in the country and only later moved to the city. Since forests were prevalent in the eastern third of the United States, the major social task—however individually performed—was clearing the land of timber and animal life. To the vast majority of those who settled what became the United States, Indians were simply another form of animal life, to be killed off, pushed west, and, eventually, to be placed in vast cages known as reservations.

European Migration and Exploration before Columbus

Since the beginning of modern times—for our purposes the end of the fifteenth century—some sixty million Europeans have migrated overseas, the majority of them to the United States. (The extracontinental migration of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans will be discussed in later chapters.) But prior to the Age of Discovery and throughout most of recorded history, Europe has been a target rather than a source of mass immigration. As he tells us at the beginning of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (471?–400? B.C.) believed:

The country now called Hellas had in ancient times no settled population. On the contrary, migrations were of frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers.

Thucydides was trying to rationalize Greek migration myths, of which the Iliad and the Odyssey are only the most famous. Such myths abound in many cultures: The invasion of Canaan led by Moses and Joshua and the Aeneid are the two best known in Western civilization. All are attempts to explain how a given people got where it was. Thucydides was committing the historian’s most typical sin, telling more than he knew. Even now, twenty-five centuries later, scholars are not clear about where the Greeks came from and their relation to and/or identity with the mysterious Sea Peoples—so described in an Egyptian document—who were clearly disturbers of the peace of the eastern Mediterranean some twelve centuries before the beginning of the Christian era.

In historic times, the Greeks themselves became colonizers, settling, outside Europe, first the coasts of Asia Minor and later the whole Mediterranean littoral, and then, in the time of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) and his successors, they planted Greek cities as far east as India. They, with the Vandals, who crossed from Spain into North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, are the major exceptions to the generalization about Europe being a target rather than a source of mass migration in premodern times. The Romans, to be sure, deposited military garrisons across North Africa and Southwest Asia, but they did not migrate in large numbers outside Europe, while imperial Rome attracted immigrants from many parts of the Old World. Captives, soldiers, traders, and other voluntary migrants, the most famous of whom were the Apostles Peter and Paul—all made Rome a multiethnic metropolis.

The mass migrations into Europe chiefly took three routes: across the narrow straits at either end of the Mediterranean—the Bosporus and the Strait of Gibraltar—and, most important, westward across the eastern European plain. Successive mass migrations of whole peoples—what the Germans call Völkerwanderungen—were sometimes set off by repeated incursions into eastern Asia and Europe itself by armies of mounted horsemen from the grasslands of central Asia. Lasting until the final Mongol invasion in the early thirteenth century, these conquests and raids created a dominolike movement of so-called barbarian peoples throughout the Eurasian landmass and into North Africa. Tacitus (55?–117?), the first writer to examine this phenomenon, speaks of a furor Teutonicus—a rage of Germans—but modern scholarship has modified his views and sees these Germanic invasions more as a regularized process of settlement.7

From the south the chief invaders represented Islamic civilizations. First came the Moors, who reversed the Vandals’ route by coming north across the Strait of Gibraltar. Their advance was stopped only at Tours in west-central France in 732. Islam remained in Iberia, or part of it, for more than seven centuries. Its presence helped create a tricultural civilization in Spain—Islamic, Christian, and Jewish—which, at its peak, was the most advanced in Europe.8 When, in that famous year of 1492, the Christian crusade the Spanish call the reconquista was complete and the Moors were driven from their final footholds in Granada, much Spanish energy could be directed to the New World. The impact that the reconquista had on the Spanish imagination is hard to overestimate, but one of its symbolic hallmarks was the dotting of the New World landscape with the place-name Matamoros (death to the Moors), even though the nearest Moor was an ocean away.

The final invasion of Europe—until 1943, that is—came at the other end of the Mediterranean. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turks, one of the peoples originally from Central Asia, overran the Balkans and reached into central Europe as far as the gates of Vienna. Although their advance was stopped in 1683, the Turks dominated much of southeastern Europe for centuries, and contemporary Turkey, a member of NATO, still has European footholds on the northern shores of the Bosporus and on Cyprus. Although cultivated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans like Mozart and Rossini could, in Die Entführung aus dem Serail and L’Italiana in Algeri, poke fun at Islamic rulers, for more than a millennium Islam was no laughing matter.

It was competition with Islam plus religious fervor that produced one of the first European attempts at overseas colonization, although, to be sure, the sea was the landlocked Mediterranean. These, the Crusades, the papally inspired attempts of western Christendom to regain the Holy Land, occurred, intermittently, from the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century. They succeeded only in establishing four ephemeral western Christian kingdoms at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The most important of these, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was called Outremer—overseas—by its French suzerains. These tiny realms can be called the first European colonies overseas. The wars that were fought over them were the first European—as opposed to Greek and Roman—colonial wars. There was one intrinsic difference between these wars and their successors: Only in the Holy Land and its vicinity did European kings—for example, Louis IX (1215–70) of France and Richard I (1157–99) of England—personally lead armies in the colonies. And, in most subsequent colonial encounters, Europeans would enjoy superiority in both armament and techniques. In the Holy Land, after initial Crusader successes, this was not the case. From the time of the sultan Saladin (1137–93) most of the military initiative was with the crescent rather than the cross.

But even more important from the point of view of colonization and immigration history were the slow but steady steps which various groups of maritime Europeans began to take west, out into the Atlantic. For centuries before Columbus’s epochal expeditions, traders and fishermen had been venturing far from European shores. Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962), himself an explorer of note, wrote that the discovery of Iceland by Irish monks in the sixth century was probably the effective discovery of the New World, since from Iceland, when the weather conditions are right, one can see Greenland, and from the southern tip of Greenland one can sail southwest to the North American mainland without ever being out of sight of land.9

That the Norsemen or Vikings—the word means “men of the viks,” or fjords—reached and tried to colonize North America, hardly any scholars now doubt. These hardy sailors and fierce fighters, who were the terror of maritime Europe for centuries, seem to have made several settlement-founding expeditions to the North American continent around the year 1000. These voyages are still generating scholarly controversy not to speak of outright fraud and ethnic jealousies. The late-nineteenth-century “Kensington Stone,” which purported to show that Vikings reached at least as far south and inland as Douglas County, Minnesota, presumably after marching overland from southern Hudson Bay, and the celebrated “Vineland Map,” announced by Yale University with great fanfare a few years ago, are only the most prominent and “successful” fakes. Most of those who have supported extreme claims for the Vikings have been of Scandinavian ancestry, and most of those who most vehemently deny the significance or even the existence of Viking settlements have been of Italian ancestry. (On the other hand, the most successful debunkers of the fakes, such as UCLA’s Erik Wahlgren, whose demolition of the Kensington Stone is a classic, have also been of Scandinavian ethnicity.)10

No one knows exactly where “Vinland the Good” and the other Viking settlements were located, and guesses have ranged as far south as Virginia. Almost certainly, none was in the United States. The chief argument for a more southern site is the name that Leif Eriksson gave to his colony and the fact that grapes don’t grow in the Far North. But when one remembers that his father named a snowy, treeless island Greenland, and that both men were promoters, it need not disturb us that Vinland was probably on Newfoundland. The most likely site has been identified: L’Anse aux Meadows on its northern shore. The site was first investigated by Helge Instad, a Norwegian archaeologist, in 1960, and subsequent digs have unearthed suggestive but not-quite-clinching evidence. As noted, Eriksson’s settlements were short-lived, and Greenland ceased being inhabited by Europeans some time in the fifteenth century. Iceland has remained inhabited.

In more southerly waters the historical record is clearer. The Canary Islands, just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, had been known since classical times. Other islands were discovered by Portuguese navigators in the course of the fifteenth century, when Portugal became the major European seafaring power. Its Infante Henrique Navegador (1394–1460)—Prince Henry the Navigator in English—established a center for maritime technology and discovery at Sagres (on Cape Saint Vincent) at Portugal’s southwest corner. From this seagoing “mission control” were launched the successive probes of Africa’s western coast: a Portuguese ship first rounded Cape Bojador in 1434; in 1441 the first cargo of gold and slaves was brought back from West Africa; and so on, until finally Bartholomeu Dias (1450?–1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. That paved the way for Vasco da Gama’s (1469?–1524) epochal voyage that reached the west coast of India in 1498. Six years earlier, of course, the Italian navigator had, unwittingly, “discovered” the New World. (In all fairness, that greatest of “discoveries” should have been credited to the systematic successors of Prince Henry—but, as John Kennedy liked to say, life isn’t fair.)

The Portuguese had also pushed the frontiers of European navigation farther west. In 1419, they discovered the Madeira group, some 350 miles off the coast of North Africa, and, beginning in 1431, discovered and colonized the previously uninhabited Azores nearly 750 miles out in the Atlantic. Samuel Eliot Morison describes the extensive Portuguese search for what he calls “flyaway islands” of both ancient myth and false reports by mariners. Almost certainly the Portuguese would eventually have reached some part of the New World on their own, as, after Columbus, they did when in 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral (1460?–1526?) stumbled on that part of Brazil that juts toward Africa.11

Eight years previously Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), the Genoese sailing in the service of Their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, made the first of his transatlantic voyages. His voyages represent the effective European discovery of the New World (although he himself never acknowledged that he had not reached parts of Asia) and catapulted Spain, which had chiefly been concerned with internal affairs and the Mediterranean, into the New World and the leadership of Europe. Cynics have sneered at Columbus as a man who, when he started, didn’t know where he was going, when he arrived didn’t know where he was, and when he returned, didn’t know where he had been. The important fact to remember is that it was Columbus who planted the first permanent European colony in the New World—and, it should also be noted, he was a superb navigator.12

For nearly half a millennium after Columbus, Europeans migrated overseas in ever-growing numbers. Only in the years since World War II have migrations into Europe again become numerically more important than migrations out of it. During most of that period, European population soared, as the following table indicates:

Table 1.2

European Population, 1600–2000 (in millions)

YEAR

POPULATION

% INCREASE

1600

95

—

1650

100

5%

1700

120

20%

1750

140

17%

1800

190

36%

1850

270

42%

1900

400

48%

1950

580

48%

2000

729

26%

The causes of this population rise are complex and often quite different from one European country to another. (See, for example, the discussion of Irish population growth in chapter 4.) Among the chief causes of the early growth are increased agricultural production and a lessening in intensity of the plague: After 1750 or so, the industrial revolution was a major factor and, in more recent years, dramatic increases in the life span have been most important. Whatever the causes, this growth in population is clearly one of the factors that impelled Europeans to migrate: During that same period some sixty million Europeans left Europe to go overseas—most of them to the New World, and most of those to the United States.

The Laws of Migration

Why did sixty million leave Europe? Why did so many others stay? These are the most important questions a historian of immigration can ask—and among the most difficult to answer. One therefore needs a kind of generalized conceptual framework within which the experiences of groups and individuals can be structured, compared, and contrasted. A hundred years ago a British social scientist, E. G. Ravenstein, tried to propound what he, in good nineteenth-century fashion, called the “Laws of Migration.”13 Today we would call them tendencies or some such more flexible term, but, remarkably, most of Ravenstein’s generalizations seem valid to contemporary scholars.

In addition, modern students of migration have developed a few special words to facilitate description of some of the major factors in migration. The chief of these are push, pull, and means. Push refers to those forces existing in the place of origin that encourage or impel persons to emigrate. These forces may be catastrophic, such as the Irish potato famine or an earthquake in the Azores; political, such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes or the failure of the revolutions of 1848; or, most often, economic pressures of one kind or another, including the pressures of a growing population. Pull refers to those attractive forces emanating from the migrants’ goal that draw migrants. Pull forces may be partially false, like the famous handbills that drew the Joads to California in The Grapes of Wrath. Noneconomic attractive forces include promises of political and/or religious freedom and such factors as climate and freedom from military service. As was the case with push forces, most pull forces are, in the final analysis, economic. Means is shorthand for the ability to migrate: This includes the availability of affordable transportation, the lack of restraints on mobility in the place of origin, and the absence of effective barriers at the destination.

Before turning to a discussion of Ravenstein’s laws, I want to talk about the major immigration myths that most Americans believe. I call these the myths of Plymouth Rock, the Statue of Liberty, and the Melting Pot. The first holds that most immigrants came for religious or political liberty; the second holds that most immigrants were dirt poor, or as the poet Emma Lazarus (1849–87) put it, “the wretched refuse of [Europe’s] teeming shore”; while the third argues that, in the phrase of another Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), America was a “melting pot” in which nationalities and ethnic groups (but not races as we understand the term) would fuse into one. Although Zangwill apparently invented that usage of the term in his 1909 play of the same name, the idea had been around for more than a century. J. Hector St. John (1735–1813), the pseudonym of a Frenchman who sojourned here for a few years before returning to France, had written romantically of the American, the “new man,” being “melted into a new race of men.”

Like most enduring myths, each of the three contains a part of the truth. Persons did—and do—come to the United States seeking liberty; some have found—and will find—the way to wealth from poverty-stricken conditions; and while there has been a continuous genetic mixture of ethnic groups in the United States, most individuals are still aware of their ethnic background. As Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan put it, the melting pot “simply did not happen.”14 Not only have ethnic groups and, even more important, awareness of ethnicity, persisted, but in the United States and Canada (as opposed to Latin America) relatively little amalgamation has taken place. If one had to make a single sweeping generalization about immigration to the United States it would be that most immigrants were not the poorest persons in the countries from which they came and that economic betterment was the major motivating force. The myths do not square with the actual American experience.

Ravenstein’s “laws,” on the other hand, do so square, at least in their basic thrust. I have divided them into three general categories: characteristics of migrants, patterns of migration, and volume of migration. The examples I use to illustrate them are my own.

A basic characteristic of migration is that it is selective. Under all but catastrophic conditions, only a minority of any population is likely to migrate. The kinds of migrants from a given society will be determined, in large part, by the conditions in that society. Although most nineteenth-century migration to the United States was heavily male, that from Ireland after about 1851 was almost evenly divided by gender, and, after 1890, females predominated, for reasons peculiar to Irish society. During the same period and on into the twentieth century, two-thirds of the Poles and almost nine-tenths of the Greeks were males.

Pull migrants, according to Ravenstein, tend to be positively selected, while push migrants are negatively selected. Ravenstein means that migrants for whom conditions “at home” are not intolerable will come because they wish to and because their talents seem to fit the available opportunities. Conversely, those who are “pushed out,” like most of the recent refugees from Cambodia, are persons who, except for the “push,” would never have left. Similarly, the degree of positive selection tends to increase with the difficulty of the means. Ravenstein argues that the more difficult the migration is to accomplish, the more calculated is the decision to leave. Until late 1989, for a contemporary East German to decide to cross the Grenze—the border between the Germanies—was a much more consequential decision than that of a border crosser from Mexico into Texas. Both were committing illegal acts, but the consequences of being caught were much less serious for the Mexican.

Another “law” stressed by Ravenstein is the heightened propensity to migrate at certain stages of the life cycle. Most migrants tend to be young. Some 40 percent of Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. From Greece and Italy, at the same time, large numbers of migrants were child laborers, part of the so-called padrone system that flourished in both the Old World and the New. In contemporary society much of the “brain drain” from Third World countries is composed of recent graduates of colleges and professional schools. Despite this, the iconography of American immigration—the way in which it is depicted in visual images—stresses women and children and family groups even though they were a minority—in some periods a very small minority—of all immigrants. Even today, when our immigration laws favor family reunification, families most often arrive serially. This is now usually called chain migration, as the migrants, whether members of a nuclear or an extended family, follow one another as links in a chain.

Ravenstein posited that the measurable social characteristics of migrants tended to be intermediate between the characteristics of the population of origin and the population of destination. Although much contemporary migration—particularly brain drain and some refugee migration—does not conform to this notion, what Ravenstein was pointing out was that most migrants were not at the very lowest levels of the societies they left but were usually below the average attainments in measurable social characteristics—education, income, and the like—of the societies to which they came.

Insofar as patterns of migration were concerned, Ravenstein pointed out that most migration takes place within well-defined streams. Whereas one generalizes about migration from Europe, from England, and from Italy going to the New World, to the American colonies, and to the cities of the northeastern United States, the fact of the matter is that migration often follows more precise patterns, often from a particular region, city, or village in the sending country to specific regions, cities, or even specific city blocks in the receiving nation. Sometimes, as in the case of the first considerable German migration to the New World in 1683, the pattern is set because a whole group of villagers with a pastor comes at once, in this instance from Krefeld to what became Germantown, Pennsylvania. This pattern was followed during the colonial period by thousands of other German immigrants who settled much of southeast Pennsylvania, becoming what their neighbors called the Pennsylvania “Dutch,” apparently from the word Deutsche. The phenomenon of stream migration continues. Few have described it better than Robert Harney, writing about Italian migration:

It was almost as if not just individuals and families but whole towns and villages formed an electric arc over the Atlantic. The poles at either end were the paese in Italy and its colònia in some eastern port or Chicago. The particles moving in the arc might be young bachelors or struggling fathers, ritornati, wives and children, remittances and steamship tickets, but they were all part of a single economy and an enclosed world. The paese for those who followed the arc became a psychic state, not a location.

He might have added that the arc could stretch to very small cities as well. For instance, several thousand Italians settled in and around Dunkirk, New York, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Almost all of them came from one town in Italy, Valledolmo.15 Such arcs continue today, mostly from places other than Europe. In Los Angeles, for example, if one travels along the seedier end of Sunset Boulevard, in the area north and east of Dodger Stadium, one will find enclaves of Central and South Americans—Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Colombians—many of whom came not to “El Norte,” or to California, or to LA, but to a precise area, perhaps a few blocks square, where they knew that their relatives, friends, and compatriots were established.

For every major migration stream, Ravenstein insisted, a counterstream develops. Most of those who have written about migration to America, from the earliest times to the numbers game currently being played by the Immigration and Naturalization Service about “illegal aliens,” have ignored the fact that many immigrants return. That return is the counterstream. It is difficult to quantify this phenomenon, partly because of the way that the United States kept its immigration statistics. Congress ordered that incoming migrants be counted in 1819; no regular count was made of returning aliens until 1908; and, even today, no systematic count is made of American citizens who emigrate. Scholars were slow to investigate this, partly, I think, because returning was a kind of rejection of America. The serious study of return migration from America begins with the work of my mentor, Theodore Saloutos, who studied returned Greeks in They Remember America (1958). One of the more vexing problems in interpreting the available data is that more than a few immigrants came, went back, and came again, with each entry being counted as another immigrant. I interviewed one Issei—first-generation Japanese immigrant—who could document six trans-Pacific round trips before final passage to America. Just as enthusiastic “America letters”—letters written by or for immigrants for the folks back home—could be a spur to migration, the firsthand experience of disillusioned returnees could be a retardant.

Ravenstein liked to calculate what he called the “efficiency” of migratory streams: Stream minus counterstream equals net balance of migration or efficiency. He argued, in a common-sense way, that efficiency would be higher for immigrants who were pushed rather than pulled, for those who had a long and difficult migration rather than a short and easy one, and that efficiency would be greater in times of prosperity in the host country and lesser in times of economic hardship. This last point, although apparent to close students of the nineteenth century even without quantitative data, was underlined by the experience during the great depression. In the years 1932–36 (July 1, 1931–June 30, 1936) more than twice as many immigrants left as were admitted, some 260,000 to 120,000.

The rates of remigration vary widely between ethnic groups who migrated contemporaneously. Thomas Archdeacon has constructed a useful if too-precise chart that calculates remigration rates (what Ravenstein called efficiency) to the first decimal place for the period before 1930. The range runs from a miniscule 4.3 percent for “Hebrew” (only the Jews and the Irish have remigration rates below one in eight) to a high of 87.4 percent for “Bulgarian/Montenegrin/Serbian.”16 It is also clear that those who established families here were less likely to return than those who did not; however, family groups did travel both ways. My father’s family, for example, first migrated to the United States in the 1880s, returned to Great Britain about 1890 in time for him to be born there, but returned, to stay, with him as a babe in arms. Thus he was an immigrant with both older and younger siblings who were native-born Americans.

Ravenstein’s hypotheses about the volume of migration need not detain us long. He held that the volume of migration would vary according to the degree of diversity of the territory of the host country, with the degree of diversity in the people attracted to it, according to the difficulty of the means, according to economic conditions in both the host and sending countries, and with what he called the state of “progress” in both countries. Insofar as diversity has been concerned, the United States, with a wide variety of climates and environments, has attracted many more immigrants, and from more diverse sources, than has Canada. In Ravenstein’s time the difficulty of the means chiefly involved the availability and affordability of transportation: Today, when most immigrants arrive by jet, it is more likely to involve legal difficulties—getting permission to leave, to enter, or, in some cases, both.

A striking example of how changes in transportation have affected immigration volume and settlement patterns may be found in the Puerto Rican experience. Even though the island was annexed in 1898 and there were no significant legal difficulties to prevent its inhabitants from entering the United States, very few Puerto Ricans came to the mainland until after World War II because of the high cost and infrequency of transportation. Just after the war’s end, when cheap air transportation to the mainland was inaugurated, Puerto Rican migration flourished. And since this transportation—originally set up to fly tourists to the sun—was based in New York, Puerto Rican barrios developed there first rather than in Florida, which was closer.

Since most migration has economic causes, economic conditions, in both the host country and the homeland, naturally have a great effect on the volume of migration. That immigrants went back to Europe during the Great Depression of the 1930s reflected not so much prosperity in Europe but the fact that it is easier to be poor in a poor country than in a rich one. Today the Polish government is doing a thriving business in attracting Polish-American social security recipients to Poland, where the zlotys their dollar retirement checks can buy translate into a higher standard of living than they could afford in the United States. Ravenstein’s notion about “progress” affecting volume of migration is best shown by the case of Japan, which no longer sends working-class immigrants abroad: Those who come now are likely to be managers of American branches of Japanese companies.

The chief value of Ravenstein’s laws is that they provide us with a way of thinking comparatively about the migrations of various peoples in different parts of the world and in various eras and, above all, of reminding us that migration is a universal process. At the same time we must remember that migration is carried on by individual immigrants who, although their actions may conform to larger patterns, are each acting on what, to them, is a unique combination of motives. In a great many cases the precise reasons for migrating, and even more for migrating to a particular place at a specific time, are so complex that not even the migrants themselves can properly assign the appropriate weight to the various factors that impelled them to move. And although we live in an age of increasingly sophisticated ways of counting and estimating, it is important to realize that there is no such thing as a calculus of motives, that there are no computer programs for the human spirit.

Emigration from Europe in Comparative Perspective

Of the roughly fifty-five million immigrants who have, in historic times, come to what is now the United States, nearly seven out of ten came from Europe, and without in any way minimizing the importance of the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who have come, we must never forget that, until the 1960s, Europeans predominated in migration, not only to the United States but to other nontropical settler societies all over the world. (In many tropical societies to which Europeans migrated—for example, the Caribbean—unfree and semifree migrant laborers, usually Africans and Asians, greatly outnumbered the Europeans.) The phenomenon of migration from Europe is, therefore, of paramount importance to any understanding of American immigration.

The classic essay on this topic, by the British historian Frank Thistlewaite, was presented to an international congress of historians in 1960.17 Ironically, this was the point in history when the emigration of Europeans from Europe was becoming less numerically important than migration into Europe by persons from the New World, Africa, and Asia. Part of this latter flow represented, in the case of previously imperial countries like Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the coming of immigrants from their former colonies. (Some young left-wing scholars at the University of Birmingham waggishly titled an otherwise dreary book on the topic The Empire Strikes Back.) Other parts of the flow represent what the Germans call Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. These people, mainly from southern Europe and Turkey, were supposed to build Volkswagens, and so on, and then go back home. Many have stayed. The fact that the main Hamburg public library now has a large section of children’s books in Turkish is but one piece of evidence showing that the German government’s plans have been thwarted by ordinary people, who so often in history manage to do what they want in spite of the efforts of the authorities.

Thistlewaite’s paper pointed out first of all that of the fifty-five million Europeans* who emigrated overseas between 1821 and 1924, some thirty-three million, or three-fifths, went to the United States. Nevertheless there was also a massive movement—twenty-two million persons—elsewhere, so that to represent migration from Europe as simply an aspect of United States history was to misunderstand it. He was highly critical of previous scholarship, pointing on the one hand at the historians of immigration who tended to treat emigration from Europe as a simple case of “American fever” and on the other at those historians of Europe who had all but ignored this topic. Even today one can search the indexes of most books (including textbooks) on the general history of modern Europe in vain looking for references to emigration, or sometimes finding only citations of the important but ephemeral flights of the Huguenots or of the émigrés of the French Revolution.

Thistlewaite noted, as had historians of previous generations, the tremendous growth in European population during even the peak immigration years. Unlike his predecessors he had at his disposal relatively sophisticated demographic research, which enabled him to point out that even while Europe was sending so many of its people overseas, its share of the world’s population was increasing from about a fifth to about a fourth. He noted that in no decade of the period had emigration drawn off as much as 40 percent of that decade’s natural increase of population—that is, the excess of births over deaths.

One of the factors that distinguishes European emigration to the United States from that which went elsewhere is the sheer diversity of those who went to the United States as opposed to the relative homogeneity of the emigration to the other major receiving states. The 22 million European emigrants who did not go to the United States went chiefly to the British dominions—4.5 million to Canada and fewer than 1 million to Australia—and to Atlantic South America—5.4 million to Argentina and 3.8 million to Brazil. Immigration to Canada and Australia was dominated by persons from the British Isles; in Australia that domination continued until after World War II. As late as 1947, nearly three-quarters of its foreign born, 73.1 percent—were of British birth. Italians and Spaniards dominated immigration to Argentina, contributing, according to the 1914 census, more than a third each. Most of the former came from south of Rome, most of the latter from Galicia, so that Argentines still call all new Spanish arrivals “Gallegos.” In Brazil, where 2.3 million immigrants were enumerated in São Paulo alone between 1882–1934, Italians at first predominated. About 73 percent of the more than nine hundred thousand immigrants who arrived between 1887 and 1900 were from Italy, mostly north of Rome. In the same period Spain and Portugal supplied about 10 percent each. In the twentieth century, Italians, mostly from south of Rome, were only 26 percent, followed closely by Portuguese and Spaniards at 23 percent and 22 percent, respectively. The largest other group was Japanese, who started migrating to Brazil’s coffee fields after the United States was closed to them. Some one hundred thousand went to Brazil between 1908 and 1930.18

In the other major receiving countries, the relative incidence of immigrants in the population was higher than in the United States. In the decade 1901–10, for example, the rate of immigration into the United States was just over one thousand per one hundred thousand of population; it was about fifteen hundred for Canada and three thousand for Argentina. In some countries, the incidence of immigration rose and fell dramatically, most markedly in Australia. The 1861 census showed that three of five Australians were foreign born, 62.8 percent; by 1901 they were only one in five, 22.8 percent. In the United States the percentage of foreign born during the peak immigration years is one of the most amazingly consistent of our historical statistics: Between 1860 and 1920 it was never lower than 13.2 percent nor higher than 14.7 percent. Thus, during the sixty-year period in which the Civil War was fought, the nation became industrialized and urbanized, and other dizzying changes took place in every phase of American life, a constant one American in seven was of foreign birth.

Although the vast majority of these immigrants were Europeans—and by far the largest groups of non-European foreign born reported by the census were Francophone and Anglophone Canadians, the descendants of Europeans—the ethnic composition of the American foreign born changed over time. In 1860 at least 84 percent of the foreign born were either British (53.1 percent) or German (30.8 percent). Most of the British were, in fact, Irish, and the German figure understates the number of German ethnicity, as many of the Swiss and French reported by the census, which was concerned with nationality by place of birth, were German speakers. By 1890 the British/German majority had shrunk to 63.9 percent: 33.8 percent British and 30.1 percent German. In 1920 the two national groups were only a little over a quarter of the 13.7 million foreign born: 15.6 percent were British and 12.1 percent German. There were almost as many Italians as Germans and more than twice as many Eastern Europeans as Britons.

But if we restrict ourselves to examining gross numbers of immigrants by nationality or ethnicity we miss much of the drama and substance of the immigrant experience. First of all very large numbers of immigrants came and went. In 1904, for example, some 10 percent of the nearly two hundred thousand Italians who entered the United States told immigration officials that they had been here before. In South America the percentage of remigrants was much higher. For years thousands of Italians took ship every November after the European harvest to work in the wheat and flax fields of northern Argentina, only to return to Italy in time for the spring planting. Argentines called them las golondrinas, for the swallows whose annual migration was almost as long from southern California to the pampas and back. Thistlewaite compares this to the post-1920 seasonal migrations of Mexicans to American harvests as far north as Montana and Michigan and sees these movements as distinguished only by “the remarkable ocean ferry.” Nor was it just the unskilled who were itinerants. English housepainters pursued their trade in the United States in the spring, traveled to Scotland for the summer, and then down to England for fall and winter. Sometimes there were intermediate stops for years or even generations. Many Irish left not for the ocean voyage to the New World but for the short eastward trip across the Irish Sea to Liverpool. Later some of them or their descendants migrated to the United States, Canada, or Australia, and—in the American statistics at least—the descendants would be recorded as English. Many Eastern European Jews first went to London or Manchester, often learning a trade like cigar making or improving their skills as tailors before moving on to New York, Chicago, or Philadelphia.

And, as some of the foregoing suggests, migratory patterns often, but not always, first involved journeys within the nation of origin, or in the Old World, before traveling to the New. Between 1876 and 1926, for example, 8.9 million Italians went to the Americas. During the same period at least 7.5 million went to other parts of Europe and North Africa, while uncounted millions migrated within Italy. How many participated in all three kinds of migrations we just do not know. If, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants tended to come to places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska directly from overpopulated rural districts, after industrialization set in many first migrated from those same rural districts to Scandinavian cities and then to American urban centers such as Chicago and Jamestown, New York.

We cannot quantify these intro-European movements to the degree that we can do so for transatlantic migration, partly because overseas migration has attracted so much more attention. It is clear, however, as Professor Friedrich Edding of Kiel University has noted, that the “sum total of all these movements was always greater than the volume of overseas migration.” He suggests that in the decades before World War I seasonal shifts took between 1 and 2 million persons annually across national frontiers. For the interwar period the demographer Dudley Kirk has estimated that some 10 million Europeans west of the Soviet Union were living outside the country of their birth. Even more important “as many as 75 million were living outside of their native province or department [and] at least one-third of all Europeans were living outside the commune of locality of their birth.”19 Put another way, before World War II, some 150 million Europeans were living in Europe, but not in the places of their nativity. This movement was, in general, from rural areas to urban ones, from less-developed countries to more-developed ones within Europe.

Although all the industrialized nations and regions in Europe received migrants, France was the European country of immigration par excellence, a fact not revealed in many histories of France. By 1896 more than 250,000 Italians were there and by 1913, 500,000, which was roughly a third of the number of Italian born then in the United States. After the American Congress restricted immigration severely in 1921 and 1924, France received more immigrants than any other nation. By 1932 there were in France more than 900,000 Italians, 500,000 Poles, 330,000 Spaniards, and 300,000 Belgians, not to mention small but growing contingents from France’s overseas empire. Among the colonials who lived in France for a time was the Vietnamese who became known to history under his revolutionary name, Ho Chi Minh.

From the Age of Discovery until the 1920s, European overseas migration in general and migration to the United States in particular was heavily male, although both the iconography and the political rhetoric about it, whether from Ronald Reagan or Mario Cuomo, stress families. Cartoonists hostile to immigration liked to draw breaded, threatening-looking figures to represent immigrants, but photographers were usually sympathetic and focused on women, children, and families. (The covers of at least two recent books on immigration have been graced by Lewis Hine’s appealing portrait of a doe-eyed young Jewish woman wearing a babushka.) A rough generalization can be made about gender ratios: Through the peak immigration years and into the 1920s, perhaps two immigrants in three coming to the United States were males, most of them youths and young men. However, an even greater proportion of those immigrants who returned were males. Students of immigration have long associated the sex ratios existing among immigrant groups with the rate of return: The more women in a given group, the more likely all members of that group were to stay. According to the calculations of Professor Thomas Archdeacon, the “maleness” and “remigration rates” of specific immigrant groups yield a “high Pearson product-moment correlation of .689,” that being a standard statistical device for measuring the relationship between two phenomena. The three groups least likely to remigrate (Hebrews, 4.3 percent; Irish, 8.9 percent; and Germans, 13.7 percent) are among the six “least male” groups (Irish, 46.4 percent; Hebrews, 54.3 percent; and Germans, 57.5 percent). At the other end of the spectrum the correlations are similar. The three groups most likely to remigrate are among the four “most male groups.20*

This, then, is the general picture. The people of a whole continent, Europe, were on the move internally and expanding into other continents as well. Its millions who came here and stayed to become Americans and the ancestors of Americans were largely young adults, predominantly male, and drawn mostly from the lower but not the lowest ranks of European society. Although they came for a wide variety of social and personal reasons, the rubric “economic betterment” covers the vast majority of cases. This is the overall impersonal picture no serious student can ignore.

And yet there is something more to be said. Coming to America, whether as a sojourner or a settler, was in many cases to partake in an adventure, a drama, even a dream. For many the adventure became a disaster, the drama a tragedy, the dream a nightmare. Not all the individual stories have happy endings, and many who journeyed to America, Argentina, or Australia, would have been better off had they never left home. Too often in writing about immigrants we forget that there were immigrant losers as well as winners, and that sometimes “winning” took generations.

Despite these and other negatives, American immigration was and is overall a success story. Although I have no desire to contribute to what Richard Hofstadter called “the literature of national self-congratulation,” any historian of immigration must report a positive balance, must show a “bottom line” written in black ink. The positive balance is not just for the immigrants personally, or for some of them: It also reflects the positive gains of the nation. While there have been those, like MIT’s Francis Amasa Walker (1840–97), the first president of the American Economic Association, who argued that the presence of immigrants caused the fertility of so-called “Americans” to decline, few scholars believe such things today. The demographer Richard A. Esterlin writes that this is not only highly unlikely but if there had been no immigration, “fertility among the native stock might have been even lower than it was.”21

Walker’s comments reflected not only the increasing anti-immigrant feeling in late-nineteenth-century America but also the enduring notion that persons who came early in our history should be called colonists or settlers, while those who came later should be called immigrants. Such a view is obviously nonsense. Although there is some utility in distinguishing between immigrants and native born, the second generation of any immigrant group—those born in the country of choice—are native stock whatever prejudice or law may say about them. (In the Netherlands today, for example, the children of foreigners born there are not usually citizens: That occurs only with the grandchildren.)

The rest of this book will focus on the immigrants themselves, their children, and sometimes their children’s children, from the earliest European and African “settlers” to today’s jet-age migrants. And while it will be, as near as I can make it, objective history, it will also be something of a celebration. A celebration not of national self-congratulation but rather of human daring (or foolishness) on the part of those who deliberately chose to become strangers in a strange land.