Quacking the Code Returns! (Part II) Krugman's plans for an 1850s immigration policy

The Nobel Prize winning economist is correct in saying that millions of Europeans immigrated in the 1800s, he just forgets to mention the flaws in that process.

Famous American illustrator Thomas Nast depicted Irish immigration for what
it was in the 19th century, including the violence towards police and street crime.
(Getty Images)

In the previous installment of this analysis of Paul Krugman's article calling Donald Trump, the Republicans, and their voters "Know Nothings", we dealt with his deflection of the topic to attacking conservatives and like minded voters as uneducated dolts that cannot handle the intellectual rigours of a college education. The real issue of how a modern western state should modulate its incoming immigrant population was obfuscated by his obsession with attacking the opponents of unfettered influxes of the Third World poor.

So in what way did Krugman compare the immigrant waves of today and the 19th century? He cited the major waves of immigration from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia, and other European states as if those were painless and altruistic intakes of the most valuable people in the world. The comparison is possible between 21st century Third World migrants and 19th century Old Europe ones, but it actually detracts more from Krugman's argument than it helps. If one analyzes the history of those people that came over, the abuse, exploitation, and crime that resulted took decades or even a century to be resolved and when they were it was not through Keynesian state welfare programmes. In fact, if we wanted to recreate the absorption pattern of the Old Europe immigrants, we would have to take a diametrically opposed approach to the way immigrants are absorbed today.

Why did the come?

Germania, A painting whose creator is unknown, symbolized

the failed Revolution of 1848 (Wiki Commons).

The impetus for Krugman's idiotic op-ed was the alleged comment by Donald Trump that Third World countries are "shit holes". I've been remarking about this since then that if these places are not shit holes, then why are they considered Third World? Europe in the 19th century was about the same as the Third World of today. The German immigrants of that time were driven to leave due to the failure of the progressive Revolution of 1848. 

Unlike some of the other waves that Krugman discusses, many of these immigrants were liberal activists of the classical enlightenment tradition and they were settled in rural areas like Texas and Wisconsin. There they typically became small-holding farmers or labourers. There is very little in common between that wave and the ones of the modern day where social-political motivations are almost absent. Many of these German liberals desired a free press, freedom of speech, and a unification of the German princely states into a modern nation state. None of those issues are the main desire of immigrants from Central America, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. 

Let's also remember that during this era the USA was a sparsely populated frontier nation. In 1850 Chicago had less than 30 thousand residents, whereas Bremen had 50 thousand. Rural Europeans in Germany and elsewhere were often barred from owning land. What did the USA have a lot of that could bought cheaply? Land. 

Were all of the 48ers fresh faced smart philosophers? Of course not, but one does have to factor in the facts that they were moving to a younger frontier country with no welfare state, with plenty of arable land for sale. The German 48ers were also unusually liberal for their time in that they were often staunch abolitionists and opposed the Confederacy during the Civil War. They were so obstinate in this view that 37 of them were killed in the Massacre of Nueces by Confederate soldiers.

This James Mahoney illustration of the destitute Irish tenant 

farmers in Skibbereen shows the poverty and desperation at the time

of the Great Famine of 1847-50. (The Sun (UK)).

Another pre-Civil War immigration wave came from Ireland.

This was truly a flood of the abused poor from an oppressive, discriminatory regime and humanitarian crisis to an uncertain future in the New World. The Irish emigrants, if they were Catholic, could not vote even if they were male, and they were typically tenant farmers of the upper class Protestant landowners. The Great Famine of 1845-49 left these already impoverished peasants starving and bereft of any resources. The incompetent British government response to this crisis allowed 1 million Irish to die and caused a further million to emigrate from Ireland to among other places the USA. 

Between the years 1840 and 1860 almost 1.7 million Irish reached the shores of the United States. As in the contemporaneous German wave of immigration, the Irish reached a younger, more rustic nation than we have today. Unlike the Germans, however the Irish were overwhelmingly illiterate and completely destitute. Many of them were used as the lowest rung on the labour ladder of the 19th century. They lived in the blighted urban areas of New York City and Boston of those years, and were the greatest target of the Know Nothing Party that Krugman talks about. 

But if one examines the facts of the time, these immigrant populations were in fact wracked by crimes such as prostitution, drunkenness, and extortion. Irish American author TJ English documents the history of organized crime among this immigrant group in Paddy Whacked. The gangs of Irish immigrants were iconic for that era as exhibited by Martin Scorcese's fictional adaptation of Herbert Asbury's non-fiction history book Gangs of New York. Crime wasn't exclusive to the Irish or immigrants -- after all one of the most fearsome gangs of the time were the "nativist" anti-immigration Bowery Boys -- but their arrival triggered tension between the local and new poor groups including the 1863 New York City draft riot in response to conscription for the Civil War. Gang violence never completely subsided in American cities, it was just replaced by successive waves of immigrant arrivals.  Following the Irish, immigrant crime became increasingly organized and sophisticated.

Political violence by Irish immigrants was also very common, as numerous emigrants remained steadfast in their fight against British crown dominance over their homeland. In 1848 the Young Irelanders attempted an abortive rebellion that was easily crushed by the British. The Fenian Brotherhood was formed by John O'Mahony to agitate for Irish independence in the diaspora, and by the end of the Civil War they were arming themselves and preparing for violent action against the British. This resulted in the Fenian raids of 1866-71 against British ruled Canada. The result of these armed incursions by the Irish led not to Irish independence but to anti-American sentiment in Canada, and increased Canadian nationalism. 

Italian immigration began in earnest in the 1880s.

This was partly due to the birth pangs of Italian unification begun in the 1860s under the royal House of Savoy. But Italy as a modern nation state did not create a united Italian people. The more prosperous and industrialized northern cities of Modena, Torino, Firenze, and Milan had little in common with the backwater southern regions of Puglia, Campania, Sicily, and Calabria. Whereas northern Italy resembled the rapidly industrializing German regions, southern Italy was closer to the conditions of Ireland. Under the new Italian kings in Rome, Sicily and the rest of the southern region known as the Mezzogiorno remained under the thumb of feudal landlords, oppressive taxation, and military conscription. From 1880 to 1915 Italy lost 13 million citizens to emigration, the largest single nation voluntary emigration in world history [1].  

Many Italian immigrants typically settled in crowded apartment blocks on the East Coast, and worked in manual labour jobs for low wages. Among the southern Italian immigrant population another importation was the  secret criminal societies Camorra (Naples), Mafia (Sicily) and 'Ndrangheta (Calabria). Early during the immigrant wave these groups feuded with each other according to their region of origin, but by the 1920s they began to consolidate into more organized and structured groups more generally called the Italian American Mafia. Though the participation in these crime organizations never became a significant statistical segment of the Italian American community, the effects on law and order in the United States were pronounced enough that by the 1980s prosecution in suspects from the USA, Italy, and Switzerland led to the longest criminal jury trial in American history in the Pizza Connection trial. More crucially the leaders of the American Mafia were targeted in the Mafia Commission Trial including leaders of the Five Families of New York City. 

Overall, Italian American immigration led to a vibrant and well-adjusted sector of American society after the first and second generations. Painting them by the crimes of the Mafia would be unjust, yet so would be portraying their immigration as some sort of glorious process where everyone came out happy.

Effects on the home nations

In none of the examples brought here or discussed in the Krugman op-ed did emigration to the United States bring about improvement of the society of the mother countries of the emigrants. 

• Ireland remained under the boot of British domination until the Easter Rising of 1916 eventually led to independence for the south in 1922. To this day it remains one of Europe's poorer nations. 
• Germany eventually united into an empire but its social upheavals would come to the surface following the defeat in WWI and eventually led to the rise of totalitarian Nazism.
• Italy like Germany became an imperial power for several decades but economically lagged behind the rest of Europe and fell under the spell of fascism in the 1920s. It continues to grapple with widespread state corruption since WWII as well as rampant crime and economic lack of opportunity in the south. To a large extent, while united in name Italy remains a collection of different regions with very little in common culturally, economically and linguistically. Standard Italian is not as commonly spoken as the regional dialects. 

If the nations of the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere are to be reformed into functional states that do not drive their people to seek greener pastures, the United States cannot remain the relief valve for social unrest in those countries. Since their independence many of the impoverished nations of the world have been called derisive names such as Third World and Banana Republics. They suffer through military juntas, coups, religious fanaticism, and other socially repressive models that stifle freedom and encourage them to seek opportunity elsewhere. But the emigration of these people will not bring about a better tomorrow. Instead it will lead to continuing misery in the home country and ethnic tension at their destination. Even as I am writing such processes are taking place in Honduras, Venezuela, Iran, and other Third World nations. In Venezuela the internal unrest is so strong that even in its oil hub residents are claiming that either "we loot, or we die of hunger". Outbound emigration will not solve this. We need to place the onus of solving social decay on the nation of origin, not on the destinations. How many waves of immigration is it going to take to bring these countries up to the par of the First World economically developed nations? The answer cannot be found in recorded history. It's time to reverse course on immigration, or else Krugman will have to reckon with real Know Nothing movements gaining power throughout Europe in the near future.

[1] Choate, Mark. 2008. Emigrant Nation: The making of Italy abroad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.