{"id":5980,"date":"2017-03-02T22:53:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T04:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=5980"},"modified":"2017-03-03T09:20:21","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T15:20:21","slug":"fact-checking-emma-lazarus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/03\/fact-checking-emma-lazarus.html","title":{"rendered":"Fact-checking Emma Lazarus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\n

\"By<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Give me your tired, your poor,<\/div>\n
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,<\/div>\n
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.<\/div>\n
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,<\/div>\n
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
From The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
That\u2019s the story we learn in school, isn\u2019t it?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Immigrants were destitute and persecuted, and would have starved had they stayed in their home countries, but the United States offered them refuge.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What\u2019s more, we\u2019re told, whenever one expresses concerns about assimilation of our current cohort of immigrants, that the native born have always feared lack of assimilation, but each successive cohort of immigrants landed at the bottom, and worked their way up, to be replaced by a new cohort of immigrants at the bottom, a new wave from a new country, now feared and disdained by the very sons-of-immigrants who had forgotten about their roots.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Which is all a very moving story, and suggests that the morally right thing for we Americans who are descendants of immigrants to do, is to continue to allow new waves of immigrants in, with as much generosity as in the past, knowing that history \u201cproves\u201d that our fears are misguided. \u00a0We should also think back in our family history and know that it\u2019s hypocritical to object to the entry of largely poor and uneducated workers, because our ancestors came under similar circumstances.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Here\u2019s another document, the \u201cofficial\u201d Catholic \u201csocial teaching\u201d<\/a> on immigration:<\/div>\n
\n
First Principle: People have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their families. . . .<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
When a person cannot achieve a meaningful life in his or her own land, that person has the right to move. . . .<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
While individuals have the right to move in search of a safe and humane life, no country is bound to accept all those who wish to resettle there. By this principle the Church recognizes that most immigration is ultimately not something to celebrate. Ordinarily, people do not leave the security of their own land and culture just to seek adventure in a new place or merely to enhance their standard of living. Instead, they migrate because they are desperate and the opportunity for a safe and secure life does not exist in their own land. Immigrants and refugees endure many hardships and often long for the homes they left behind. As Americans we should cherish and celebrate the contributions of immigrants and their cultures; however, we should work to make it unnecessary for people to leave their own land.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Now, there\u2019s a sleight of hand in the move from \u201cright to migrate to sustain life\u201d to a right to a \u201cmeaningful life,\u201d and from the \u201cright to migrate\u201d as a right to leave one\u2019s home country, into a right to move to the particular country of one\u2019s choice, but, apart from that, the clear expectation is that, by the very fact that they are migrants, all migrants are compelled to leave their home countries because of\u00a0the utter misery there, so that it\u2019s not even open to discussion whether they \u201cneeded\u201d to migrate or not.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
But what if that\u2019s not true?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0I\u2019ve been reading a book that I dug out of my basement, The Transplanted, A History of Immigrants in Urban America<\/em>, by John Bodnar. \u00a0Like most such books in my basement, it dates to my college\/grad school days, and, in particular, was published in 1985, so I can\u2019t attest to the degree to which his ideas have held up or been supplanted by new scholarship (and whether that new scholarship is credible or just new). \u00a0Fun fact: the image above, from the Wikipedia entry on Italians in the United States<\/a>, \u00a0is also the cover photo; I find it interesting that this photograph, at least to me, produces a sense that these people are destitute and downcast\u00a0but the caption says they\u2019ve got more luggage than the few items in the photo, lost in the Ellis Island version of baggage-claim.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Anyway: \u00a0the first chapters of the book talk about the circumstances in which immigrants came to the United States. \u00a0There were a number of factors, among them the population growth in any given country, and the inheritance patterns \u2014 whether the farm is divided among all children\/sons, or passed on to the firstborn \u2014 but also the impact of the industrial revolution and capitalism (in the sense that historians use the term, to talk about the advent of factories owned by capitalists \u2014 men with capital \u2014 replacing small family workshops) and large-scale \u201ccapitalist\u201d agriculture; all of these, as well as specific political events (e.g., the impact of the unification of Italy) impacted different parts of Europe at different times. \u00a0In addition, the simple factor of transportation \u2014 the ease with which some regions could access ports \u2014 played a role, and there was a common pattern of migration from one region of the country to another preceding emigration elsewhere.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
But here\u2019s the key pattern Bodnar observes: \u00a0it was not the wealthy who immigrated \u2014 they were doing just fine where they were. \u00a0It was not the poor, either \u2014 they couldn\u2019t afford to travel, and were more likely to end up in the industrializing cities (or, for the Irish, to cross the Irish Sea to England); it was the middle- and lower-middle class.<\/div>\n
\n
Abundant evidence exists . . . to suggest that those departing were not coming from the depths of their respective society but occupied positions somewhere in the middle and lower-middle levels of their social structures. \u00a0Those too poor could seldom afford to go, and the wealthiest usually had too much of a stake in the homelands to depart. \u00a0(p. 13)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0(Commenter SKJAM! mentioned this just yesterday, coincidentally, in a comment on my \u201cFact-checking the fact-checkers\u201d post, which spurred me to take this post out of its half-written draft form.)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
To be sure, that wasn\u2019t universally true, and certain groups had more \u201cpush\u201d than \u201cpull\u201d factors (yes, I know about the Irish during the potato famine!) but Bodnar supports this conclusion with details from a number of immigrant groups. \u00a0Here\u2019s a bit about the Italians:<\/div>\n
\n
The image of poor peasants fleeing to America has also dominated much of the scholarship on Italian emigrants but closer analysis reveals that the very poor seldom left. \u00a0For instance, the average yearly wages in Abruzzi e Molise and Calabria were well above those in Tuscany and Lombardy, and yet emigration was heavier from the former provinces than the latter. \u00a0Usually those who left were in the middle and lower-middle levels of the peasantry. \u00a0Supplementing this stream was a characteristic segment of artisans, craftsmen, and others with skills which were increasingly difficult to implement in societies undergoing either a commercialization in agriculture or growing competition with manufactured goods. \u00a0(p. 20)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It is also a key part of the \u201cimmigrant\u201d experience that a fair number of these arrivals were not immigrants at all, but simply migrants. \u00a0Here\u2019s Bodnar again:<\/div>\n
\n
No phenomenon is more central to understanding the motives of those moving from agricultural to industrial regions nor more revealing about the predisposition to use industrial wages to improve or maintain status in the rural world than the process of return migration. \u00a0Because everyone did not or was unable to return should not obscure the fact that a return was usually every emigrant\u2019s goal. \u00a0The only major exceptions seem to have been those who had worked as craftsmen or those who ventured to America before 1860 with sufficient capital to initiate farming or commercial enterprises in the new world and groups such as East European Jews who faced severe political restrictions in the homeland. \u00a0While estimates vary, return rates usually ranged from 25 to 60 percent, although most records on immigration are somewhat imprecise. \u00a0Hvidt found about 30 percent of the Danes returning, and the German figure was between 35 and 40 percent. \u00a0About four of every ten Greeks returned, and the Polish figure was only slightly below that. \u00a0The most likely of all to return were those from central and southern Italy (56 percent) and northeast Hungary. \u00a0Magyar rates have been estimated at 64 percent and those of Slovaks at 59 percent. \u00a0 \u00a0(p. 53)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And, indeed, Lazarus wrote her poem with an eye to the plight specifically of Jews escaping persecution in Russia, not with respect to immigrants in general.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It\u2019s my understanding that, in many cases, the same is true today. \u00a0The Syrians and other migrants who flooded into Europe via Turkey over the past several years paid a substantial amount of money for the trip \u2014 as much as $10,000. \u00a0There are reports of Africans making there way across the Atlantic into Central America, and then upwards to Mexico and then crossing illegally into the U.S. \u2014 again, not a cheap voyage.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Now, I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m not far enough along in my reading of this book or others to assess the second half of the \u201cimmigration myth,\u201d that each successive cohort of immigrants worked their way up, only to wrongly disdain the new arrivals. \u00a0I had hoped to do some reading and come to a firmer conclusion on that point before writing this up, but I\u2019m running out of steam. \u00a0But it doesn\u2019t seem to fit with with what I know about American economic\u00a0mobility, at least in its most simplified form. \u00a0If you think about the urban poor in the 19th century, was it really the case that the children of immigrant factory workers went to school, learned their lessons, and got good office jobs when they graduated? \u00a0Wasn\u2019t it, by and large, the case that those children left school in their early teens (or even earlier) and went to work in those same factories, and only with the advent of the modernization of the economy in the 20th century, that the lot of the urban poor improved, for everyone regardless of how many generations ago their ancestors immigrated? \u00a0To be sure, there was a certain social and political mobility, as Irish-ancestry politicians came to dominate machine politics, for example, but that\u2019s not the same thing as this simplified view of income stratification by time-since-arrival.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What does this mean? \u00a0Largely, it\u2019s a matter of what this doesn\u2019t<\/em> mean. \u00a0The narrative of \u201cwe have an obligation to welcome destitute immigrants because our ancestors were also once destitute\u201d doesn\u2019t work, nor does \u201call migrants are always, by definition, only ever coming because they are in dire need.\u201d \u00a0I am not, in this post, expounding on the right decisions about immigration to the United States in the year 2017. \u00a0I\u2019m just saying that we can\u2019t make them by telling ourselves incorrect stories about the past.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
UPDATE: \u00a0yes, there are issues with line spacing. \u00a0Bear with me.<\/div>\n
And here\u2019s a related article, \u201cSyrian Refugees Resettled in the U.S.: Why Them and Not Others?<\/a>\u201d which says that the UNHCR seems to be picking refugees for resettlement to the US seemingly at random, even among people who had a fairly stable living situation, despite the claim that they were sending the most vulnerable, the most needy. \u00a0Not sure what to make of this but it seemed worth sharing.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0Image: \u00a0By Lewis W. Hine(Life time: 1874-1940) \u2013 Original publication: Photo-studyImmediate source: Brooklyn Museum, Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=51292180<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! From The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. That\u2019s the story we learn in school, isn\u2019t it? Immigrants were destitute and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-5980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\nFact-checking Emma Lazarus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/03\/fact-checking-emma-lazarus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fact-checking Emma Lazarus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 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