Immigration and labor : the economic aspects of European immigration to the United States / by Isaac A. Hourwich.

  • Isaac Hourwich
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Immigration and labor : the economic aspects of European immigration to the United States / by Isaac A. Hourwich. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Europe and the Asiatic provinces of Turkey. Yet while the root of all evil is now sought in the racial makeup of the new immigration, as contrasted with the old, every objection to the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe is but an echo of the complaints which were made at an earlier day against the then new immigration from Ireland, Germany, and even from England. Three quarters of a century ago, as to:day, the only good immigrants were the dead immigrants. There is no real ground for the popular opinion that the immigrants of the present generation are drawn from a poorer class than their predecessors. It is a historical fact that prior to 1820 the great majority of the immigrants were too poor to prepay their passage, which never cost as much as $50 per steerage passenger; the usual way for a poor man to secure transportation for himself and family was to con¬ tract to be sold into servitude after arrival. The next gene¬ ration of immigrants was not much better off. According to contemporary testimony, the millions of Irish and Germans who came in the middle of the nineteenth century were ignorant and accustomed to a very low standard of living. Since the races of Southern and Eastern Europe have become predominant among immigrants to the United States, the steerage rates have been doubled, the increase being equivalent to a heavy head tax. The higher cost of transportation must have raised the financial standard of the new immigration, as compared with the immigrants of the 70’s and the early 8o’s. This inference is borne out by the fact that the percentage of illiteracy is much lower among the immigrants than among their countrymen who remain at home. Illiteracy is generally the effect of pov¬ erty. The higher literacy of the immigrant may be accep¬ ted as evidence that economically the immigrant must be above the average of his mother country. The complaint that the new immigrants do not easily “assimilate” is also as old as immigration itself. To-day the Germans are reckoned by courtesy among the “ English-
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