Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [48]
THE PETER PAN FALLACY
If anything, nativists of old like Senator Ellison Smith had more reason to complain than we do. Back then, immigrant arrivals were much more numerous relative to the size of the U.S. population. In the 1990s, legal and illegal immigration from Mexico numbered an estimated 4.2 million, or 1.5 immigrants per 1,000 U.S. residents each year. By comparison, Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute has noted that in the midnineteenth century the United States absorbed an average of 3.6 Irish immigrants per 1,000 U.S. residents annually—more than double the current flow of Mexicans. For fifty years, from 1840 to 1890, the rate of German immigration was greater in every decade than the current flow of Mexicans. And from 1901 to 1910, Russian, Italian, and Austro-Hungarian immigration each surpassed the current rate of Mexican immigration.
Like today’s Mexicans, the majority of those Southern and Eastern European labor migrants arrived poor and unskilled. They worked in industry, mining, and the building trades. Early on, they were employed as stable hands, lumbermen, dock workers, ditch diggers, and in other arduous jobs Americans didn’t want. The men built canals and found work on railroads. The women toiled as domestics. They spoke foreign languages and settled in overcrowded, ethnically distinct ghettos where poverty and crime were pronounced.
Those immigrants didn’t check their cultural baggage at Ellis Island, and that didn’t go unnoticed by the natives. Ulster migrants were presented in the press as dim-witted drunks and whoremongers who were filling up the jails and asylums. They were also seen as dirty and diseased. Prior to large-scale Irish immigration in the mid-1800s, cholera cases were rare in American cities. After the Irish arrived, cholera epidemics swept through the neighborhoods in Boston and Philadelphia where they had settled. An outbreak in Boston in 1849 killed hundreds, and more than two-thirds of the fatalities were among the Irish. You can guess who the natives blamed.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Italy had one of the highest illiteracy rates in Europe—62 percent in 1871. In response, the country passed a law in 1877 that made formal education compulsory for Italian children. In the Mezzogiorno, or Southern Italy, where more than 80 percent of Italian Americans trace their ancestry, illiteracy rates were even higher than the national average, and riots ensued after the law was enacted. The violent reaction reflected a cultural hostility to formal education. Lower-class Italians valued work over school and didn’t trust the state authorities. Nearly 4 million Italians immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1914, and those attitudes toward education came with them. Italian children subsequently struggled in schools, when they bothered to go at all. In 1910, according to the political historian Michael Barone, only 31 percent of Italian immigrants between fourteen and eighteen were enrolled in school, versus 48 percent for the Irish and 56 percent for the Jews. “Boys were encouraged to work as soon as possible, to bring money into the family,” says Barone. To paraphrase Heather Mac Donald, cutting school was something of a tradition among Italians.
The Irish and Italian experiences were the rule, not the exception. Life in America was hard, and many weren’t up for it. Even though “thousands of miles of ocean” separated them from their native lands, labor economist Michael Piore found that one-third of these European newcomers returned home in the period leading up to World War I. As with Mexicans today, some came, discovered that the streets weren’t gilded, and left.
But of course the majority of those impoverished, poorly educated, and unskilled people decided to tough it out and