Disinformation and the Migrant Surge
The big, big business of transporting migrants, in the 1870s and today
Hi, I’m Alison Peck and this is How We Got Here, a journey through the history of United States immigration law with bulletins from the front lines of today, by a law professor and immigration lawyer.
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What’s driving the recent migrant surge?
Disinformation, many law enforcement experts claim.
Cartels are making big money off human smuggling right now, U.S. and Mexican officials say. As U.S. immigration policies fluctuate from one administration to another and from year to year, smugglers prey on confusion and uncertainty. More lenient policy? Now’s the time. Stricter policy announced? Pay us a premium for greater protection on the journey.
Smugglers advertise their services on social media like TikTok, YouTube, or WhatsApp. They end with a promise of more information in private communications. Messages disappear, evading enforcement. Others pop up to replace them.
“‘Here we are in New York City,’” said a speaker with a Venezuelan accent in one video, according to BBC. “‘I’d like to thank my companions for getting me here safe and sound.’”
Disinformation in the Settling of America
Enticing emigration with false promises may be the world’s oldest profession.
In my research this week, I reviewed newspapers from a southern Ohio town in the 1870s to see what talk my biographical subject might have heard about immigration as a child. Before the financial panic of 1873, the papers were stuffed with talk of what was then usually called “emigration.”
The papers made passing mention of the arrival of foreigners (mostly from the United Kingdom and Germany), but overwhelmingly, when they talked about emigration, they meant moving west.
The paper I was studying, Highland Weekly News, was studded with ads appealing to would-be emigrants and letters back home to Ohio from those living out west.
“Colonists and families,” promised the Indianapolis, Cincinnati, & Lafayette Railroad, would find “Such Comforts & Accommodations as are afforded by NO OTHER ROUTE.” Many emigrants were headed to Kansas, which had been opened to White settlers in 1854 but didn’t see heavy immigration until after the Civil War. “IMMIGRANTS to Kansas,” the railroad ad said, “for the purpose of establishing themselves in new homes, will have Liberal Discrimination made in their favor by this line. Satisfactory commutation on regular rates will be give to colonies and large parties travelling together, and their baggage, immigrant outfit, and stock, will be shipped on the most favorable terms.”
The railroads had a huge stake in the game thanks to the many land grants the federal government had awarded them since 1850. As incentives to build a trans-continental railway system and supply the Union war effort, railroad companies received twenty- or fifty-miles strips in alternating sections from western lands. What they didn’t use for railroad purposes they could sell off – if they could find enough willing buyers. Most railroad companies had land offices and bureaus of immigration that lured settlers to the west from the eastern states in the United States and Europe.
The land grant sales were high stakes for the railroads – and for the tribes who lost the western lands through a combination of trespass, treaties, and removal. In October 1870, the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad Line ran an ad in southern Ohio with the headline “IMPORTANT TO IMMIGRANTS!” Their railroad was, they said, the “CHEAPEST, MOST DIRECT AND QUICKEST ROUTE by which to reach the famous Osage Indian Cession of Kansas.” The Osage tribe had been forced by immigration pressure to sell their land to the federal government in exchange for a reservation in the summer of 1870.
False Pretenses and False Promises
Although emigrants to the western states stuffed the train cars with children, farm tools, household goods, the picture of prosperity the railroad agents sold did not always match the reality upon arrival.
I have lost both of my horses, and have but one sack of corn left to bread my family of ten persons. There is no work that we can get to do to procure bread stuff with. And the question arises, What shall we do?
On new year’s day in 1875, a man named William Mooney took up his pen, swallowed his pride, and wrote a letter back home to Highland County, Ohio. Mooney had been among those hopeful emigrants who had moved west, seeking land where he could raise his family in comfort.
But Mooney had not found the land of plenty he had been promised. After being forced out of Kansas due to corruption he did not describe, Mooney had tried again in Missouri. He did find rich and fertile soil that might yield ample crops in good years. But the prior year had brought both drought and an infestation of a cereal crop pest called chinch bugs. More established settlers could survive, but newer arrivals like Mooney were stuck. Mooney described the reality to his old neighbors in Highland County:
What are we to do? Shall we abandon our homes and go somewhere else? This many of us could not do, as many teams have died for want of grain. Many of the old settlers have raised plenty to do them until they can raise another crop, and some have a surplus, but nothing will buy it but money above the market price. The new settlers are the ones who are suffering the most, and who have had to rent land to raise their first crop on, while they were improving their own lands.
Mooney had been sold a bill of goods, and he wanted others to know it, for their own sake and for his:
I am aware that many of the Western papers, in Kansas and even in Missouri, will tell you that there is no one likely to suffer in the West. They would like to make Eastern people believe so, as they do not want emigration to stop. Neither do I; but what is the use of disguising the facts?
In fact, Mooney’s situation was desperate:
I have lost both of my horses, and have but one sack of corn left to bread my family of ten persons. There is no work that we can get to do to procure bread stuff with. And the question arises, What shall we do? I have never begged, and do not wish to steal, but means of subsistence we must have, and that soon.
Mooney humbly asked if any of the readers of the Highland Weekly News, where his letter was published on January 14, would loan him $150 dollars for two years at ten percent interest plus a mortgage on twenty-one acres of fine timber land so that his family could survive until they could bring in a crop.
I wonder if they survived.
The Power of Paradox
Does 1870s history tell us how to solve today’s problems?
Not really. The railroad speculation bubble burst in September 1873 when leading financier Jay Cooke & Company of New York, heavily leveraged in railroad bonds, was suspended from trading. A global depression – called “the Great Depression” until a bigger one hit in the 1930s – followed.
The depression poured cold water on emigration and railroad company enticement of it for a while. But the railroad speculation bubble didn’t burst because of U.S. government policy choices; it happened because of market forces like the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange, which dried up the last market for U.S. railroad bonds.
Of course, the “emigrants” of the 1870s – White settlers from the eastern states and Europe – didn’t stop moving west. They kept coming until there were no more public lands to claim, and the tribes who had once occupied the continent had been forced onto small land reservations. This trajectory is wildly unlikely to be the one we’re on today, since the colonial and U.S. governments acted like sovereign powers and employed force to take over this continent in ways that no migrant population currently pretends to do. But the history soberly reminds me that the potential costs of a truly unstoppable immigration wave can, in the wrong circumstances, be catastrophic.
For me, the power of these stories lies in paradox. The stories shift my perspective – like a fun house mirror or an acid trip. Sometime the trips are bad – but they always make me work harder, make me dig deeper for empathy and simultaneously take more seriously the call for boundaries.
So maybe stories can move policy after all. Considering the quagmire of the contemporary debate over immigration policy, which encourages us to see only one perspective and no room for compromise or even rational conversation, maybe an occasional dose of paradox would do us all some good.