Diaspora

“ They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. ”

“ Commerce on the high seas, the fisheries, freedom of range for those who had been cramped in the Old World, the privilege of trying theories of government and of religion denied them in Europe, and even the opportunities for obtaining abundant subsistence though at the cost of healthful toil, began in the first half century of real colonization to prepare the way for the stupendous development of the continent and for making it the harborage of emigrating Europe. ”

“ Colonization [Pg 342] as a Remedy for Migration; The Successful Migrant; Confusing Movements; The Exodus to the West; The Migration of the Talented Tenth, and The Exodus during the World War.
In the discussion of the Successful Migrant much information is given us of individuals who succeeded by sheer grit in making their way to freedom, and in some cases in building neat fortunes for themselves and their families. The charge that the Negro appears to be naturally migratory, an assertion which comes to light in recent studies in economic progress, is declared untrue. ”

“ By new immigration we mean broadly all the aliens from southeastern Europe—the Italians, Hungarians, Slavs, Hebrews, Greeks, and Syrians—as distinguished from the northwestern Europeans—the English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, French, Germans, and Scandinavians. ”

“ We need the native to reach the native. Remember then, gentlemen, that you, the adopted children of European civilization, are the interpreters between the stranger and the Indian, between the Government and the subject, between the great and the small, between the strong and the weak ; that you walk armed with a two-fold knowledge between two nations that do not know each other, that cannot know each other, except through you. ”

“ The Irish, the Germans, the early Bohemians, the Scandinavians, and in fact all the early comers brought their families and their “household goods”, ready to settle down for all time and to become citizens of their adopted country.
A large number of the alien arrivals of recent years come here initially with only a vague intention of remaining permanently, and these make up the large emigration streaming constantly from our ports. However, it is only fair to say that eventually many of these people come back to America and become permanent residents. ”

“ THE miracle of assimilation wrought upon the older type of immigration, gives to many of us, at least the hope, that the Slavs, Jews, Italians, Hungarians and Greeks will blend into our life as easily as did the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish.
The new immigrant, or the new American, as I call him, is however in many respects, more of an alien than that older class which was related to the native stock by race, speech, or religious ties. ”

“ Instead of the Dutch and Flemish, English, French, German, Irish, Scandinavian, Scotch, and Welsh home seekers of yesterday, the tide of immigration now casts upon our shores Slavs, Magyars, Greeks, Russian Hebrews, north and south Italians, Syrians, Turks, and other people from southeast Europe who are emigrating to better their economic condition. ”

“ It would be foolhardy to deny that, at the present time, there are immense unassimilated elements in our population,—immigrants of the first or second generation, possibly even of the third. Every foreign-American society, be it Irish, German, Italian, Slovak, or any other, whatever its aims and purposes, is a standing evidence of a group of people who recognize certain affiliations or loyalties which are foreign to the out-and-out American. ”

“ It is impossible to set a limit to the number and variety of the people who, in these early centuries, either migrated, or were deported, from West to East through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or who drifted southwards into Baluchistan. Not until the ethnography of these frontier lands of India is exhaustively studied shall we be able to unravel the influence of Assyrian, Median, Persian, Arab, or Greek migrations in the strange conglomeration of humanity which peoples those countries. ”

“ For more than one generation, associations of white men, entitled Colonization Societies, have been engaged in plans and efforts for our expatriation; these have been met sometimes by denunciations, sometimes by ridicule, often by argument; but now the American government has assumed the work and responsibility of colonizing us in some foreign land within the torrid zone, and is now maturing measures to consummate this scheme of expatriation. ”

“ The emigrant breaks with his past, closes the volume of his British birth, with all of pride, honour, and love that it includes, and puts it from him altogether, or retains it only as the goal which he may hope to attain again for the comfort of his declining years. The emigrant, in a word, if he be a man of ordinary patriotism and good feeling, is to be pitied. ”

“ When these tribes broke up, left the steppes country, and migrated to other parts of the world some to the eastward, some to the westward, and others to the southward—their civilization became modified. The group-characteristics of tongue and culture became intensified through isolation from the others and by the pressure of a new environment. These were the ancestors of the Persians and the Hindoos, the Greeks and the Celts, the Teutons and the Slavs, the Romans and the Gauls. ”

“ In Chapter II it was pointed out that almost all the peoples of Europe were related, in one big family of tribes. It is likely that the forefathers of the Celts, the Latins, the Germans, the Greeks, and the Slavs belonged to one big tribe which had its home back in the highlands of Central Asia. As a general rule, the relationship of peoples to each other can be told by the languages which they speak. If two tribes are related because their forefathers once belonged to the same tribe, it is almost certain that they will show this relationship in their languages. ”

“ In thirty-three of our largest cities the foreign population is larger than the native; in Milwaukee and Fall River the foreign percentage rises as high as eighty-five [Pg 200] per cent. In all these cities the foreign colonies are as distinct and practically as isolated socially as though they were in Russia or Poland, Italy or Hungary. Foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, these colonies are separated from each other, as well as from the American population, by race, customs, and religion. ”

“ Distinctions of class, profession, or nationality, entering so largely into European life, separating man from man, lose their hold upon Europeans meeting in the distant East. The great [Pg 288] West, seen at that distance, becomes their common country; they are drawn together by the bond of common views, feelings and modes of thought which obliterate the artificial lines of nationality—nay, they feel for, and treat each other as only blood relations and brothers would in Europe. ”

“ Greece, France, Portugal, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Spain, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Roumania contributed virtually all the remainder of our 1914 immigrants from Europe, given in the order of importance.
However, we should bear in mind always that the country of origin or nationality or jurisdiction (as determined by political boundaries) is not always identical with race. Immigration statistics have followed national or political boundaries. Take the immigrants from Russia. ”

“ If there was a migration, there must have been long ages of separation between mankind in America and mankind in the Old World; otherwise we should still find some trace of kinship in language which would join the natives of America to the great racial families of Europe, Asia, and Africa. ”

“ No person will be admitted to a seat in the Convention who would introduce the subject of emigration to the Eastern Hemisphere—either to Asia, Africa, or Europe—as our object and determination are to consider our claims to the West Indies, Central and South America, and the Canadas. ”

“ European nationalities and Aryan languages were born in those momentous meetings. The zone of contact extended from the northwestern, lowland fringe of continental Europe to the saucer-shaped land of Polesia. Along the depressed margin of western Europe a heavy flow of Mediterranean men, moving constantly northward, introduced a third element in the racial constituents of French and British populations. Each of the three races contributed a characteristic share of physical and moral traits to the spirit of nationality in Europe. ”

“ To transplant the civilization of one distant country to another, requires either the simultaneous migration of a large body of the people, or a long and regular intercourse, a constant immigration from the parent race. ”

“ We can only mention other migrations or colonisations of a more limited range, that of the Illyrians and Albanians into Southern Italy, that of the Germans in Hungary and Russia, etc., as well as the arrival of non-European peoples, Gypsies and Jews, who are scattered at the present day among all the nations of our continent. ”

“ Noble and successful efforts are making by the Bible, Missionary, Tract, Sabbath School, Temperance, and other Societies in the West. Great and rapid changes are taking place, if not to the extent we desire, yet corresponding in a degree with the gigantic march of emigration and population. Many other reasons might be urged to show that its prospective increase of population will vastly exceed the ratio of its retrospective increase, but these are sufficient. ”

“ The observation of the writer and his interviews on this question with the people engaged in colonization have led him to the conclusion that such groups ought to be of from five to fifteen families each, settled in the same neighborhood among either groups of other nationalities or native settlers.
Such distribution of the immigrant settlers in smaller groups is favored by the immigrants themselves. ”

“ SECTION 2.—UNIVERSAL EMIGRATION. We have in our remarks on the Over-Sea Colony referred to the general concensus of opinion on the part of those who have studied the Social Question as to Emigration being the only remedy for the overcrowded population of this country, at the same time showing some of the difficulties which lie in the way of the adoption of the remedy; the dislike of the people to so great a change as is involved in going from one country to another ”

“ To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem. ”

“ The Problem of the European Immigrant.—The problem of the European immigrant is one of assimilation. It is difficult because the alien comes in such large numbers, brings with him a different race heritage, and settles usually among his own people, where American influence reaches him only at second hand. ”

“ We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous, to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. ”

“ But the peculiar relations of the frontier populations of the New World, and especially of the factors, trappers, and voyageurs of the Hudson Bay Company, with the native tribes, helped to create a partial equality between the civilised European and the savage, and so to beget results akin to those which have left such enduring evidences of the mingling of diverse races in the population of Europe. ”

“ In the case where societies are formed and maintained by adoption, that is by immigration, the question arises: How far is it [Pg 112] possible for a people of a different race and a different culture to take over the traditions and social inheritance of another and an alien people? What are the conditions which facilitate this transmission and, in general, what happens when people of different races and cultures are brought together in the intimate relations of community life? ”

“ More recent is the problem of the immigration of people representing all the nationalities of Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. While until late in the 254second half of the nineteenth century the immigrants consisted almost entirely of people of northwestern Europe, natives of Great Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and France, the composition of the immigrant masses has changed completely since that time. With the economic development of Germany, German immigration has dwindled down ”

“ We not only have a present nation-size job of assimilation, but we need to prepare ourselves for the problems that will accompany negotiations for peace. We shall have at least three questions of great and far-reaching importance—incoming immigration, outgoing emigration, and citizenship status in America and abroad. ”