The Great Hypocrisy rather than The Great Replacement. Part 3

We concluded the previous post with a couple of quotes concerning the negative image that Italian immigrants had acquired in the US during the migratory wave at the turn of the 20th century. This historical context makes the contemporary anti-immigration frenzy in Italy seem quite ironic. This third part will be the last one in our series of commentaries on migration. Here we shall continue with historical examples that demonstrate the same challenges that earlier generations of Europeans faced when crossing the Atlantic. To the extent that pure racism is the underlying motive of the conservative panic of today, its former version within the US was directed in the same manner against people from Europe. For a start, let’s remain with the Italian peninsula.

“The impulse that every year prompts from a quarter to a half of a million Italians to wander overseas is purely economic. [... ] Although Argentina seconds the United States in absorbing the overflow, still, Italy's population continually swells, her birth-rate is not sinking so rapidly as her death-rate, and one sees no reason why the Italian dusk should not in time quench what of the Celto-Teutonic flush lingers in the cheek of the native American. [...] The fact that the emigrants from the north of Italy wander chiefly to South America, where industrially they dominate, while the emigrants from central and southern Italy come to this country, where they are dominated, makes it important to remember that in race advancement the North Italians differ from the rest of their fellow-countrymen. [...] I have yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily that send us the flood of ‘gross little aliens’ who gave Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision ‘of a huge applied sponge - a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might still have recovered.’”

Among the key problems, from the American nativists’ racist point of view, was that the Italians were not even true Europeans. According to Madison Grant, “these new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions.” People from Italy were allegedly members of the so-called Mediterranean race, and only the Nordic people constituted “a purely European type, in the sense that it has developed its physical characters and its civilization within the confines of that continent.” Only a Nordic person was “the Homo europæus, the white man par excellence.” And now, of course, such sources of immigration - supposedly from Europe but not of clean European origins - were threatening the great “American race”. Here is some more pessimism from Grant:

“The native Americans are splendid raw material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this primary law of nature. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.”

So, did the American “race” perish as a result of all of this Italian, Hispanic, or Slavic immigration? How would our contemporary conservative person answer this question today? In any case, while the immigration of the “undesirables” was alive and kicking, the arrival of the pure European Nordic stock was more or less being exhausted. At least in the case of the German “race”. While modern-day Germany is regarded as a destination rather than a source of migration, “more than 5 million people left Germany for the U.S. during the 19th century.” By the start of the First World War, however, the situation had changed:

“The German influx dropped sharply as soon as the panic of 1893 broke out, and when, after four and a half years of economic submergence, this country struggled to the surface, the tide of Teutons was not ready to flow again. America's free land was gone, and ruder peoples, with lower standards of living, were crowding into her labor markets. In the meantime, Germany's extraordinary rise as a manufacturing country, her successes in foreign trade, and her wonderful system of protection and insurance for her labor population, had made her sons and daughters loath to migrate overseas. The immigration from Germany into the United States is virtually a closed chapter, and has been so for twenty years.”

Here we encounter at least two historical lessons. First, Italians today are no longer associated with crime as it once was the case. Genetics do not change so rapidly; hence, only economic and social development can explain the presence or absence of crime. It would be kind of Italian conservatives to apply this same social principle to contemporary migration as well. Secondly, the German lands no longer send their populations overseas to the same extent as they once did. For German conservatives who do not want foreigners in their country, the historical parallel should be clear. The economic and social development of their homeland halted German emigration, so the same historical processes in the so-called developing parts of the world can likewise reduce emigration from those regions. And to refute any racist claim that German immigrants would be expected to pose no risk of criminality, here is some historical background from the US:

“Among the twelve thousand-odd aliens in our prisons, the German prisoners run a little above the average in their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the average in their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalities that figure in the police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect to almost every form of misconduct, near the middle of the list. The French and the Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders against chastity, the Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the Americans in burglary, the Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians in assault, the Irish in disorderly conduct. But the German lacks distinction in evil, never coming near either the top or the bottom of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On the whole, his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.”

As we can see, our Nordic friends are equally capable of committing crimes, given a particular economic and social environment. Only a racist ideological agenda can obscure all the historical evidence in front of us. A great example is provided by Viktor Orbán, who has attacked Germany for taking in refugees by stating that “if you take masses of non-registered immigrants from the Middle East into your country, you are importing terrorism, crime, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.” Hungary may not yet be as prominent a destination for migrants as Germany, but it equally has a history of emigration to the US. And what do the historical records tell us about the ancestors of today's Hungarians?

“Their crime record is bad. No alien is more dreaded by the police than a vengeful or drink-maddened Magyar. The proportion of alien Magyar prisoners who have been committed for murder is 35.6 per cent., higher than of any other nationality save the Russians.”

If one was willing to argue that the modern day migrants have an inherent tendency for criminality, then the same has to be applied to the Magyars. Namely, given that they were once committing many crimes on the other side of the Atlantic, they should be regarded as being equally dangerous today. In any case, to the extent that Hungary’s Slavic neighbours might agree with Orbán that contemporary migration constitutes an “invasion”, history has another ironic twist to offer. For there was a time when, in the US, some people expressed concern over “the great Slav invasion”:

“While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great intellectual awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans, the bulk of the Slavs remain on a much lower plane of culture. In ignorance and illiteracy, in the prevalence of superstition and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and state, in the subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the low position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness and comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at the level of our English forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth.”

So much for all the claims of backwardness and barbarism in relation to the migrants of today. And what about all the fears regarding low birthrates among the white Europeans? Those “uncivilized” Africans and Arabs have much larger families than the “civilized” Europeans! And not only that, but they also hate the liberties that European women have! And don’t they treat their own women poorly? Patryk Jaki from Poland has stated, for instance, that “illegal, strong men from a different culture [...] often treat women as subhuman.” The following paragraph, therefore, is quite informative in terms of historical context, especially for our Polish conservatives:

“In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population, register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me: ‘The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people here will all be Poles.’ A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes on - a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance; pitying their women, the Americans retreat.”

It is difficult not to compare these claims with the idea, promoted by the racists of today, that pro-migrant leftists are unwittingly allowing people of colour arriving from other continents to conquer their countries with zero resistance. But what about the migrant communities that do not want to integrate into their host societies? As stated by the already quoted Jaki, Muslims “create their own neighborhoods and refuse to adapt to the laws of their respective countries.” Yet, a similar observation was also once made about Polish migrants:

“Our million Poles outnumber all the rest of the Slavs in America, and the Poles are very clannish. When they settle in groups there is little association between them and their neighbors. [...] When a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost. The core of the large settlement is likely to be a rancid bit of the Old World. Clerical domination to a degree not tolerated among other Roman Catholics, [...] the priest frequently urging his flock to ‘have as many children as God will give them,’ much loth motherhood, early death from excessive child-bearing, large families brought up by the third, fourth, or fifth wife, harsh discipline of children, political apathy, a controlled vote, and an open contempt for Americans and their principles.”

And despite all this, the person writing these words back in 1914 already possessed a greater understanding of social issues than many of today’s conservatives. For as this Edward Alsworth Ross had noted, “if the descendants of these immigrants have the proper training and surroundings they will prove as orderly as the old American stock.” And the same will hold true for migration in our own time. If anyone still insists on defending outdated racist world outlooks today, they are free to do so. In that case, it might at least be worthwhile to give them an idea of how ridiculous they will appear to the future generations. To that end, we conclude with the words written in 1896 by Francis Amasa Walker, an influential American economist at the time:

“Only a short time ago, the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one per cent of our immigration. Today the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent, and threatens soon to become fifty or sixty per cent, or even more. The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.”

Sources:
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/47954/pg47954-images.html?utm_source
2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68185/68185-h/68185-h.htm?utm_source
3. https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/german/new-surge-of-growth/?utm_source
4.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381996436_Fear_as_a_tool_of_the_electoral_narration_of_the_conservative-populist_right_wing_in_Poland
5. https://trojka.polskieradio.pl/artykul/1778697,patryk-jaki-w-sprawie-uchodzcow-jestem-zwolennikiem-polityki-twardej-tamy
6. https://amp.dw.com/en/hungarys-orban-tells-germany-you-wanted-the-migrants-we-didnt/a-42065012?utm_source
7. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1896/06/restriction-of-immigration/306011/

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