The Problematic Tragedy of Migrant Deaths
Counting the costs of migration in human lives, 1737 to 2024
Geographer Austin Kocher, who writes a great Substack newsletter about immigration enforcement, recently described fifteen years of data on migrant deaths from the activist group No More Deaths (No Más Muertes) in their El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database. The data reveal 448 migrant deaths in the El Paso Border Patrol Sector between October 2008 and June 2023. The majority of migrants died from environmental exposure (42%) or lack of water (20%). Others died from motor vehicles (11%), skeletal injuries (11%), and wall falls (6%).
I’ve thought a lot about migrant deaths recently as I’ve studied the migration of the ancestors of my biography subject, a State Department bureaucrat who helped construct our restrictive immigration laws in the early twentieth century. My subject grew up in a southern Ohio farming community founded by the children and grandchildren of eighteenth-century migrants from the German-speaking states of Central Europe. I’m following the steps of one of those ancestors, Hans Michel Finter, who arrived in Philadelphia from Württemberg in 1737.
In reviewing that history, I’ve encountered many descriptions of migrant deaths. I’ve written about some of them here before: Hans Georg Gerster wrote home to Zürich in 1737 naming the migrants from Zürich who had died at sea, in England, or after arriving in Pennsylvania. (He also mentioned a settlement of sixty Swiss who died from hunger after a bad storm wiped out most of their provisions and cooking supplies.) Maria Barbara Kober left Schwaigern with her husband and baby boy, Johann Michl, in 1738, but the baby died on the journey and her husband died shortly after they arrived in Pennsylvania. Peter Inäbnit died in a “wall fall” in 1744 while trying to escape from detention in the “prison-tower” in Bern, Switzerland, where he had been jailed on suspicion of violating laws against assisting emigration.
Thinking about Migrant Mortality, 18th Century and 21st Century
As I compare these stories to the data from the El Paso Sector Migrant Death Database, a few questions occur to me.
First, what is the difference between death arising from the dangers of migration itself and death arising from interaction with (or avoidance of) border enforcement? Arguably the deaths described by Gerster and Kober had nothing to do with border policies. Perhaps those deaths simply arose from the dangers and privations of ocean travel in that century.
If we would feel comfortable making that distinction, however, do we also have to distinguish between twenty-first century migrants who died because they were crossing a policed border and those who died because they were crossing a desert? That invites a troubling and perhaps impossible distinctions. I could imagine objections to this comparison: maybe without border enforcement, migrants today would choose other, safer means of travel, while eighteenth century European migrants inevitably crossed an ocean. But economic disparities play a role, then and now — eighteenth century migrants with money traveled much more comfortably and safely than those without, and dangerous land migration by very poor or displaced migrants would likely continue today even if crossing the border were easier. Indeed, those who criticize “Biden’s border policy” often argue that such dangerous journeys only increase as restrictions ease.
Second, my research into the early historic period in Ohio makes me wonder about other deaths that mass migrations may eventually trigger. In 1750, there were around 100,000 indigenous people living in what’s now Ohio, and only about 1,000 Europeans. In a mere eighty years, people of European descent (like my subject’s great-grandparents) would flock to Ohio in such numbers that its existing residents faced overwhelming pressure to move to smaller and smaller reserves and, eventually, across the Mississippi River. The first group to agree to move, about 200 Shawnees and a few Seneca, suffered a disastrous journey without the support they were promised; by the time they reached Kaskaskia, near St. Louis, they thought seventeen people had died, though they had lost count. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, additional groups left by force and suffered more deaths: Out of 340 Seneca and 58 Delaware who left in November 1831, thirty died on the journey. A group of 250 Shawnees and Senecas followed by 100 Ottawas and 450 Shawnee from another settlement left in September 1832 and at least 174 people were missing by the time the group reached Kansas and Oklahoma. Two groups of Ottawa left for Kansas in 1837 and 1839 and two of their number would die on the way. Only the Wyandot, who organized their own move in 1844, arrived with no mortalities. (I can’t recommend highly enough Mary Stockwell’s narrative history of these events, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians.)
Again, one could make vital distinctions between the pressure that immigration placed on indigenous North American peoples and the pressure it places on people of the United States today. European settlers not only moved in by the millions, they also wielded and manipulated (and still do wield and manipulate) both military and legal power to decimate the territories of the previous inhabitants. That same government still exercises and wields legal power (including militarized law enforcement power) against arriving people today. Perhaps that power balance can never shift, or can shift only by democratically sanctioned means inherent in that government’s identity. Still, when I feel tempted to dismiss concerns about major migration waves (and I often do, as an immigration lawyer, feel that way), I think about the experience of North American native peoples. I can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t, in their shoes, hope for a rout.
Making Eighteenth Century Migrant Deaths Grievable
The more I study migration history, the more blurred become the lines of right and wrong. As soon as I feel I’ve identified the “good guys,” I pan out and my comfortable conclusions look problematic. For example, the Shawnee, Seneca, Miami, and Ottawa may or may not have descended from the cultures who built the earthworks or mounds that still exist in Ohio today; those peoples appear to have died or moved out by 1650 before the historic tribes moved in (or moved back). Also, territorial conflicts had long existed between Haudenosaunee peoples like the Wyandot and the Algonquin-speaking tribes of Ohio. And when I study the century-long devastation of Hans Michel Finter’s homeland in southwest Germany, which lay in the tragic path between the Bourbon monarchy in France and the Habsburg monarchy in Austria, I find it hard to have no sympathy for his migration too.
Since I don’t find it convincing to separate “good” migrants from “bad” ones, I come back to Kocher’s call to “mak[e] migrants’ lives grievable.” All of them, and those they displaced, too; every victim of the whole wicked problem. I’ve tried to do that in recent posts (like those linked above) about individual German-speaking emigrants of the eighteenth century, and I laud the efforts of those who do the same for the migrants of today.
I’ve shied away, however, from calling attention to the most graphic account I’ve read of German migrant deaths, the account from Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania in the Year 1750 and Return to Germany in the Year 1754. I’ve previously written about Mittelberger’s booklet with healthy skepticism, since it was published with an homage to the duke of a state that actively sought to keep its residents from emigrating. Anti-emigration propaganda was common in that region and era and should be taken with a grain of salt. The cases Mittelberger describes likely happened, but not as ubiquitously as Mittelberger suggests: Demographers estimate that the average mortality rate was around 3.8 percent (compared with 0.8 percent for those who did not migrate.) The averages conceal the mundane catastrophe, however — voyages that took months longer than rations had accounted for; higher death rates for the more vulnerable such as children and pregnant women; families left to starve after the death of a husband and father. Mittelberger’s stories of migrant deaths at sea are graphic and disturbing; I leave it to the reader’s discretion whether they wish to click the link above to read more. (The full text of the booklet is available online through the Library of Congress.)
In my own journey with the Finter family lately, I find myself wondering what (or who) is missing from the public records. Based on the documents I’ve found so far, it appears that Finter married Anna Johanna Christiana Eyrich in the town of Nöttingen in 1731. Six years later, they migrated to North America. Pennsylvania records show their oldest child as Johann Christian Friederich Finter, born the year after their arrival, and the couple seems to have had several other children in Pennsylvania. One would expect a young couple without fertility issues who had been married for six years to have already had children when they decided to migrate in 1737. If the records I’ve found so far are accurate and complete (and I have lots of travel and digging to do before I’m confident they are), then Michel and Anna may have suffered unthinkable losses on the way to making their new home in Lancaster County.
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