Foreign Relations

American Immigration in Global Perspective

Donna R. Gabaccia

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400842223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A new history exploring U.S. immigration in global context Histories investigating U.S. immigration have often portrayed America as a domestic melting pot, merging together those who arrive on its shores. Yet this is not a truly accurate depiction of the nation's complex connections to immigration. Offering a brand-new global history of the subject, Foreign Relations takes a comprehensive look at the links between American immigration and U.S. foreign relations. Donna Gabaccia examines America's relationship to immigration and its debates through the prism of the nation's changing foreign policy over the past two centuries. She shows that immigrants were not isolationists who cut ties to their countries of origin or their families. Instead, their relations to America were often in flux and dependent on government policies of the time.An innovative history of U.S. immigration, Foreign Relations casts a fresh eye on a compelling and controversial topic.

1

ISOLATED OR INDEPENDENT?

American Immigration before 1850

Why do immigrants’ foreign attachments so often seem invisible to Americans? Consider the scene captured in 1907 by famed photographer (and child of German Jewish immigrants) Alfred Stieglitz, in the photo entitled Steerage. Students see in Steerage the deeply familiar image of European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island during the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century. So do careless scholars. They have used Stieglitz’s photograph to illustrate accounts of peasants fleeing poverty in Italy and of Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia.¹ The publishers even put this photo on the cover of the third edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

But Steerage, unlike the jacket illustration of this book, does not depict Emma Lazarus’s much-romanticized “wretched refuse”² about to find an American welcome. These are indeed steerage passengers dressed in their old-world clothes, but they were not approaching Ellis Island and a new life in the United States. They, along with Stieglitz and the other first-class passengers standing on the upper deck, were en route to Europe. They had, in fact, already been steaming eastward from New York for three days. Some would disembark in Southampton, in England; more would end their voyage in German port cities and disperse by railroad to destinations on Europe’s eastern peripheries. Steerage, one specialist concludes with delicious irony, depicts the unimaginable: it is an image of immigrants “leaving the Promised Land.”³ It is with this almost unimaginable image that my analysis of immigrant foreign relations begins.

IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN NATION-BUILDING

Americans misunderstand Stieglitz’s photo because they have almost all absorbed from childhood a domestic tale of immigration and American nation-building. Beginning in primary school, American students learn about how immigrants built America and about how they settled the American West, worked in American industry, and populated American cities. The typical high-school history of the American nation describes immigrant lives that begin at Castle Garden or Ellis Island in the nineteenth century and then goes on to tell of their difficult cultural adjustments and of natives’ hostility toward the newcomers. The story generally ends with the immigrants either incorporating into the white American mainstream or joining America’s racialized minorities, which together constitute a multicultural or culturally plural American nation. Scholarly histories of immigration, race, and ethnicity offer far more complex stories than this, but they too consistently analyze immigration as a metaphor for American nation-building as embodied in the motto of the Great Seal of the American nation—“out of many, one” (E pluribus unum).

So powerful is Americans’ image of the United States as a unique nation of immigrants that it renders literally invisible key dimensions of immigrant life, including the connections to the world that immigrants build and maintain. Yes, there have been emigrants who joyfully abandoned their former homes or who happily distanced themselves from personal, economic, or political conflicts and hardships in their countries of origin. But these were the exceptions. Historians now estimate that, depending upon the group, between 10 and 80 percent of nineteenth-century immigrants returned one or more times to their countries of birth. Most immigrants experienced separation from their previous homes and from their social relations as hardships; most invested time, energy, and resources in staying in touch across the distance they had traveled.

Americans’ conviction that immigrants must necessarily separate from their pasts and from their former, foreign homes is a powerful myth in part because it is an expression of the equally powerful, nation-building myth of the United States as a country that was isolated from the rest of the world until at least 1898 (when the United States became involved in a foreign war, with Spain) or until 1917 and its entrance into World War I. It is extremely easy for readers today to imagine the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world, with its technologies of communication and transportation that seem impossibly primitive to modern eyes, as composed of largely isolated nations. But this was not in fact the case. Scholars now trace the consolidation of a global economy and of an international system connecting the major countries of the world through trade and diplomacy to the years between 1500 and 1800. Intermittently—for warfare and revolution did repeatedly disentangle the linkages that trade, diplomacy, conquest, and empire constructed—global networks existed even before the new American nation was created.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the myth of immigrants’ isolation from their homelands persisted, in part because of its powerful resonance with Americans’ understanding of their new nation as isolated. Even a century and a half after its independence, and after almost a century of intensifying economic globalization, most of the scholars writing within the Chicago School of Sociology still focused their attention almost exclusively on immigrant adaptation, integration, and assimilation as distinctive American processes, taking place exclusively within the boundaries of the United States. For the Chicago School, too, immigration was a maker of the American nation, and immigrants’ lives were dominated by the quest to become American. Their origins and their former social attachments mattered little in such analysis. Today, too, many Americans believe that the first step a foreigner takes toward becoming an American is relinquishing her foreign connections. That is why some become angry when they hear immigrants speaking their mother tongues. The use of languages other than English suggests that immigrants have not abandoned their ties to foreign lands and thus may not be good Americans.

Americans have had no word for immigrants’ ongoing relationships to foreign places; I have invented the term “immigrant foreign relations” in order to describe it. This difficulty in seeing and naming immigrant foreign relations is especially important for understanding the new American nation in the years before 1850, because it points toward a central paradox in American nation-building. Many Americans paradoxically believed their country to be safely insulated from the negative and corrupting influences of Europe—formerly the country’s colonial master—even as millions upon millions of Europeans entered the United States as immigrants. By ignoring their ongoing connections to Europe, Americans idealistically transformed immigrants into symbols of the new nation’s independence. And they did so at a time when that independence was still extremely fragile. The invisibility of immigrant foreign relations made a new and still weak nation appear safely isolated from a dangerous world. Like its immigrants, however, the United States was not isolated from either the global economy or the system of international relations between governments created by the imperial and expanding “great powers” of Europe.

No one did more to popularize the image of immigrants detached from their foreign birthplaces than the immigrant J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. In his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in 1782, Crèvecoeur wrote with great insight but also with characteristic blindness:

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. . . . He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.⁴

In this oft-cited passage, Crèvecoeur brilliantly sketched a portrait of both immigrants and a new nation. He pointed toward the future of the United States as a melting pot of peoples from many European nations while at the same time acknowledging and accepting the fundamentally racist assumptions that would long exclude non-European immigrants from naturalization and membership in the nation.

Crèvecoeur became the first of many subsequent writers who described immigrants—much like the new country—as having left behind all foreign (and therefore “ancient” or former) habits and having broken all connections to Europe. In his view, immigrants were scarcely foreigners at all; their separation from Europe was in itself enough to make them Americans. This helps to explain, perhaps, why the word “foreigner” resonates in such negative ways for American English–speakers, who have always preferred to speak of “emigrants” or “immigrants” rather than of “foreigners,” a term commonly used in other nations and in other languages for the same mobile people Americans call “immigrants.” One finds no foundation for xenophobia or for fear of foreigners in Crèvecoeur’s description of the new Americans. Their former rulers in Europe may have been both powerful and corrupt, requiring the United States to demand and defend its independence through isolation, but Europeans themselves posed no threat to the new nation.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, many in the United States, including most of its political elite, fervently believed that the new nation had separated itself from its past as a colonized territory of Britain and from Europe’s “ancient ways.” By the early twentieth century, such assertions of U.S. separation from the world came to be called “isolationism.” Diplomatic historians long insisted that before war in 1898 delivered Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines into American hands as colonies, the United States had been “isolationist” in its orientation to the world.⁵ Only in 1960 did a British historiographer finally object to these linked tropes for immigration history and histories of American foreign relations. Frank Thistlethwaite noted with a touch of sarcasm that no “salt-water curtain”⁶—comparable, in other words, to the “iron curtain” that divided the communist Warsaw Pact nations from the “free world” in the 1950s—had ever sundered the Atlantic into two unconnected halves. Thistlethwaite aimed his critique mainly at those U.S. students of immigration who ignored immigrants’ origins and their ongoing relations with their homelands. But his observation applied equally well to students of American isolation. By most measures, Thistlethwaite suggested, the United States had never “turned its back on Europe,” as diplomatic historians sometimes insisted.⁷ Neither had the immigrants whom Stieglitz captured in 1907 with his camera.

MAKING IMMIGRANT FOREIGN RELATIONS VISIBLE

And neither had the immigrants who settled British North America or, after 1776, the new United States. True, the colonial ligaments that connected the Americas to Europe in the early modern era of European empire-building did begin to unravel as the United States and other nations in the Americas achieved independence between 1776 and 1824. But they did not thereby succeed in destroying the global network constructed since 1500. Europe’s early modern empires had already connected Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the 1600s, as the globe was circumnavigated. Within a century, the price of silver bullion in the Americas shaped the politics of both Spain and imperial China. The demand for the labor that could make American colonies profitable for European rulers drew Africa, too, into global circuits and an emerging early modern Atlantic labor market. While economic historians have described these circuits of trade and empire, it is the life stories of individual immigrants that provide the best lens for viewing immigrant foreign relations during this earlier era of globalization.

The United States emerged in 1776 as an independent nation on the North American territories that had been conquered and colonized between 1500 and 1750. First Spain and then France, England, and the Netherlands had wrested control of land and resources from the North American natives, even as they quarreled repeatedly with each other over Atlantic trade, resources, and religion, and over possession of particular European and American territories. European empire-building ushered in an era of far-reaching demographic change in the Americas, first in the form of tragic mass death among the conquered indigenous Americans, then through an equally massive import of enslaved African laborers, shipped like living freight to new world plantations, and finally through imperially sanctioned and sometimes forced transfers of Europeans as missionaries, soldiers, prisoners, merchants, and workers and farmers. Travel and communication, trade and migration, and imperial administration were considerably more difficult in the eighteenth century than they would later be, but the movement of large numbers of people was nevertheless possible, especially when profits and power served as incentives to imperial rulers, eager investors, and ruthless merchant shippers.

It is still impossible to assess accurately the demographic and economic importance of the colonial Atlantic relative to other commercially vibrant, mobile, older, and economically more developed economies that had formed much earlier around the China Seas and the Indian Ocean. We can be sure however that transpacific migrations were much, much smaller than transatlantic migrations. Twelve million Africans forced across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1800 outnumbered European transatlantic migrants during the same centuries by at least a factor of four. Even without firm estimates of Indian Ocean and China Seas migrations, the figure for the Atlantic migrations alone suggest that the world’s population in 1750 was only slightly less mobile than it is in our own times. Migrants traveled under very different, and far more coercive, circumstances than in later times, but their numbers were scarcely trivial.

North America occupied a rather marginal place in the Atlantic trade and migration circuits of Europe’s empires. As the largest migration of the colonial era, the slave trade sent only two hundred to three hundred thousand Africans to North America before 1800. North America was of greater importance for Europe’s migrants and for Britain’s rulers, of course. Unlike its imperial competitors, Britain actively encouraged settlement of its colonies, which as a result grew more rapidly than New Spain and New France. The most marginal British subjects—English religious minorities, prisoners forced to Georgia, and indentured Scottish or Scotch-Irish artisans and laborers, along with foreigners (especially from Germany)—were prominent among the emigrants headed toward British North America. Many desperately poor Europeans traveled under contract (“indenture”) and then suffered seven years of servitude in order to pay off the debt they incurred for transportation. Collectively the early modern migration guaranteed that creating new nations out of Europe’s Atlantic empires would be no simple task. The new nations of the Americas, including the United States, could not claim cultural homogeneity as their foundation; instead, the writings of men like Crèvecoeur pointed to new routes to national unity.

The earliest Atlantic migrations of people—they were almost never called “immigrants” by their contemporaries—and the conditions under which they had traveled and worked influenced Americans’ understandings of immigrant foreign relations long before Crèvecoeur wrote his influential treatise on the new American nation. Many of the migrants of the colonial Atlantic had little hope of ever returning to, or even communicating with, loved ones in their countries of birth. Enslaved Africans had been torn from their homelands and forced to a new world and a new way of life that allowed for very limited hopes of connection, no communication, and no return. This means that most slaves probably did, in a very real sense, pass through the kind of salt-water curtain whose existence Thistlethwaite questioned. Nevertheless, the famous, if controversial, life story of a single slave, Olaudah Equiano, who later wrote in support of abolition and told his life story while doing so, documented how hope of reconnection to loved ones—in Equiano’s case to his sister—flourished even against great odds.⁸ Prisoners may have had no desire to return to England, while indentured servants could scarcely entertain such hopes until they had completed their seven-year period of servitude.⁹ Well into the 1830s, their relatives in Europe nevertheless purchased space in North American newspapers requesting contact addresses “should the notice meet the eye of” the departed servants to whom they still felt connected.¹⁰ Americans’ early insistence that transatlantic passengers separated irrevocably from Europe thus almost certainly drew on the memory and language of the most coerced migrations of the colonial-era Atlantic. With eighteenth-century Atlantic fares equal to half the yearly income of poorer residents of Britain and to a full year’s income for many in Germany, return to Europe was in fact uncommon in the eighteenth century.

But it was not unknown, neither among the most prosperous migrants nor among the poorest, who included Atlantic sailors such as Equiano. Crèvecoeur’s own life, for example, completely belied...