May 3, 2006
Why Did Immigrants Go Home (Continued) Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST On the question of how many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants returned home because they were fed up with America, and how many for other reasons, Ellen Feldman writes that “undoubtedly, many immigrants worked hard in this country to get back home to their native lands, but given the high rate of remigration of those who seemed most foreign to American citizens, I think David Kennedy’s implication stands. Faced with enormous obstacles and grinding hardship, many gave up and retreated back to the old country.”
However, she quotes from the original source of the statistics that “it is impossible both to tell how many different people were actually counted as immigrants [as opposed to those arriving as temporary workers, for example] and to judge how many emigrants from America were fulfilling original hopes [to return to their homelands] or escaping unexpected disappointments.”
It seems to me, given what Ms Feldman quotes, that we simply don’t have enough information to make a judgment on the issue.
Further she writes that “it seems likely that once again the matter of the sheer otherness of the new arrivals comes into play. Germans were less alien to a WASP country than were Italians or Greeks, a fact that probably made adjustment easier and prejudice less virulent.”
Germans, of course, had been immigrating to this country for quite a while. The Pennsylvania Dutch, who were German (Dutch in this case is a corruption of Deutsch) made up a substantial portion of the population of late-colonial Pennsylvania. Further, German immigration was more a steady trickle, if a substantial one, over the years rather than a sudden influx.
But major American cities all had areas that each major ethnic group made their own, which would have greatly reduced the sense of “otherness.” I’m reminded of an old joke, from the days when Manhattan’s Lower East Side was still home to a vast number of immigrant Jews. (In 1920 the Jewish population was estimated at 400,000). One day a Jewish man walked into one of his favorite restaurants for lunch and was startled when the waiter turned out to be Chinese. He was even more startled when the waiter spoke to him in accented but passable Yiddish. After he finished, he went up to the cashier and while paying his bill said, “What’s with the Chinese waiter speaking Yiddish?” “Shhhh,” she replied in a conspiratorial whisper. “He thinks he’s learning English.”
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