Law Won't Change Immigration. But Technology Will.
Disruptive technologies and the second wave of U.S. immigration, 1880-1924.
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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Maybe you’ve seen those graphics about the phases of immigration to the U.S., like this one from Population Reference Bureau. I’ve often wondered about that spike that starts around 1882. That spike interests me as a person because my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents came to the U.S. from Slovenia in the latter half of that era (and given our national demographics, odds are decent that yours did too).
That spike interests me as a lawyer because the second immigration wave, and the public reaction it produced, led to our restrictive immigration laws. Those laws tightened like a straightjacket in the early 1920s (as the PRB graph suggests), loosened in the mid-1960s (ditto), and since then have been immediately overrun after every attempt to tighten them back up again.
What caused that spike in the 1880s? I’d always heard socio-economic descriptions: The post-Civil War industrial economy in the U.S., massive crop failures in Southern Italy, the pogroms against Jews in Russia. No doubt those things contributed. But the postwar boom didn’t start in 1882 and neither, sadly, did starvation and persecution in Europe. Why that spike?
Steamships and Lightning Bolts
Earlier this week, I had an “aha” moment when I read this news item from the London Times in 1882:
Emigration has in these latter years had its character and it proportions radically altered by the revolution in the facilities of communication between the opposite shores of the Atlanta. It is not only that the ease and cheapness and speed of transit have abated the terror and mistrust which emigration once excited. The emigrant felt that there was not place for repentance if his new home should not content him. He now is conscious that a return is a matter of a few weeks and a few pounds. Though he may never cross back himself, he beholds perpetually friends and neighbors coming and going. He hears of relatives at home. The fashions and customs of his old and his adopted country are constantly assimilating.
The rural Ohio paper I’ve been studying reprinted this article under the heading “Steam-Ships and Emigration.” Looking into steamships a little, I learned that they had made the trans-Atlantic voyage as early as 1819, but the engines were cumbersome and fuel was expensive.
Then something dramatic happened – in 1882. In March of that year, the SS Aberdeen, equipped with a new-and-improved triple expansion steam engine, made its maiden voyage from Britain to Australia. The new technology achieved 60 percent fuel efficiency compared to steamships built just ten years earlier.
The triple expansion steam engine disrupted passenger transport and accelerated the revolution that the editors of the London Times noticed in 1882. More efficient ships could be made bigger. Bigger ships meant more passengers and cheaper tickets. Cheaper tickets meant travel in both directions. It was as if Europe and the Americas had suddenly, in 1882, been pulled a thousand miles closer together.
By the way, at this point, Russian and Italian immigration ticked up a little but the vast majority of immigrants were from Germany, followed by Britain and Ireland. I haven’t yet dug deep enough to confirm it, but I suspect the wave of immigration from Italy and Russia (and Slovenia) coincided with the establishment of passenger steamship routes between southern and Eastern Europe and the United States.
There it was: Crop failures and persecution weren’t new in 1882. Fuel-efficient triple expansion steamships were. The rest is immigration legal history.
Technology, Trade, and Emigration
This new technology drove emigration not just by changing the cost of human travel but by creating new markets for the goods and produce that emigrants could create when they got to their destinations. After noting the congenial social effects of the new steamships for the emigrant, the London Times said:
But a more important effect, in its bearing on the recent growth of emigration, of the breadth and smoothness of the high-road, which steam by land and sea has paved between the Old World and the New, is the impulse it has given to the import of raw produce from the former. The road sloped once only one way, and that way in the direction away from Europe. Emigrants went to found colonies and establish themselves in fresh homes. Their departure relieved the mother country from disaffected agitators, or from cries for food it could not satisfy. So far it benefited, and it expected nothing more. The importation on a great scale of food from the rich American soil is a novel result of European emigration. A few years ago it was impossible to look upon emigration as a means of feeding Europe. No means existed of conveying either from the American plantations to the Atlantic sea-board or from the sea-board to Europe the surplus food, abundant as it might be. … American corn-fields have now been brought by steam within tangible distance of Europe; Europe accordingly dispatches its reapers to get in the harvest.
The Next Immigration-Disruptive Technology
Knowing the history of U.S. immigration law and the ingenuity of migrants and those who transport them (whom we now call “traffickers” but used to call “magnates”), I’ve long been skeptical that law – any law – will solve the immigration crisis.
But that doesn’t mean nothing will. I’ll explore this intersection of immigration and technology more in future posts (and books, hopefully).
I think you are on to something here, Alison. I look forward to seeing where this goes.