May 3, 2006
Why Did Some Immigrants Go Back Home? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon poses a valid question about whether immigrants gave up and returned home or retired to happy sunset years in their native countries, and I am grateful to Joshua Zeitz for providing some answers to it. I’d like to enlarge upon them just a little. Since, like John Gordon, I admire David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear, I accepted Kennedy’s implication that the difficulties rather than the rewards of building a new life in a new land drove many to retrace their steps. Kennedy bases his figures on the exhaustive history of American immigration Becoming American, by Thomas J. Archdeacon. The author writes that from the statistics, “it is impossible both to tell how many different people were actually counted as immigrants [as opposed to those arriving as temporary workers, for example] and to judge how many emigrants from America were fulfilling original hopes [to return to their homelands] or escaping unexpected disappointments.” But Archdeacon also points out, as does Joshua Zeitz, that Jews had the lowest frequencies of return of all the late-arriving ethnic groups. He also argues that the large remigration rate of Italians drastically reduced the impact of their original influx. The story of Greek immigration and remigration is similar to the Italian, while the proportion of Germans who returned home was low.
Though, as Archdeacon states, we have no statistics to prove why immigrants returned home, it seems likely that once again the matter of the sheer otherness of the new arrivals comes into play. Germans were less alien to a WASP country than were Italians or Greeks, a fact that probably made adjustment easier and prejudice less virulent. Jews, on the other hand, might be considered the most alien of all the new arrivals—but as both Archdeacon and Joshua Zeitz point out, they had known more terrible conditions in the countries they had fled, and they had no place to which to return.
Undoubtedly, many immigrants worked hard in this country to get back home to their native lands, but given the high rate of remigration of those who seemed most foreign to American citizens, I think David Kennedy’s implication stands. Faced with enormous obstacles and grinding hardship, many gave up and retreated back to the old country.
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