German Emigration to the United States and Continental Immigration to Germany in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Up to the end of the nineteenth century Germany was a country of emigrants. Until recently the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic migration of more than five million Germans, mostly to North America, has been largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, except by a few historians. That is all the more true for the mass movement of foreign migrant workers into the German labor market in the decades preceding World War I. Of immediate interest in West Germany today is the so-called “guest-worker question” (Gastarbeiterfrage) which is now becoming an immigration issue in contrast to the earlier “foreign-worker question” in pre-World War I Germany. In recent years West Germany witnessed the transition from a country hiring “guest workers” to one possessing a genuine immigrant minority. This ongoing experience has contributed to a new interest in the historical development of transnational migration in both of its manifestations, as emigration and as immigration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Germany experienced alternating waves of the two forms of transnational mass migration, both of which were dwarfed by the internal migration streams.

Building Walls, Bounding Nations: Migration and Exclusion in Canada and Germany, 1870–1939

“…Emigration trailed off after 1893 as a result of declining birth rates and increases in domestic employment opportunities generated by rapid industrialization. 83 Economic bad times in the United States also played a role in dissuading potential migrants from traveling overseas.…”

Immigrant Support for the American Socialist Party, 1912 and 1920

“…It also seems likely that the potential for radicalism among German Americans declined as the proportion of immigrants from the agrarian regions of East Elbia increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. These farmers and farm laborers left their native Prussia in response to a deepening agricultural crisis that began in the late 1870s and undermined their traditional way of life (Bade 1983). Their goal was to secure agrarian independence in the New World, though few of them did.…”

The Economic Progress of European and East Asian Americans

“…Among groups whose members frequently planned to repatriate-Southern and Eastern Europeans and East Asians-sex ratios initially favored males because women's role was to remain behind, tending the family holdings until the men returned (Lyman 1974, Yans McLaughlin 1977. Those groups departing with the more permanent intentions, the Irish, Scandinavians, Germans, and Jews, migrated as families or individuals and had more balanced sex ratios as a result (Kessler-Harris & Yans-McLaughlin 1978, Bade 1985, Bodnar 1985. Within these broad categories, however, cultural and structural factors promoted considerable intergroup variation (Hutchinson 1956).…”