Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910: Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914Joseph, Samuel
History
Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910: Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914
Joseph, Samuel
Jews -- Europe; Jews -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
It is also clear that the forces of economic attraction in the United
States do not play an altogether passive part in the Jewish
immigration. The very fact of an immigrant-nucleus formed in this
country and serving as a center of attraction to relatives and friends
abroad--a force which increases in direct and multiple proportion to
the growth of immigration--is an active and positive force in
strengthening the immigration current. This was early understood by
the _Alliance Israelite Universelle_ which had acted upon this
principle in the seventies and had prophetically sought to direct a
healthy movement of Jewish immigrants to this country in the hope of
thereby laying a foundation for future Jewish immigration to this
country. This current, however, once started and growing only by the
force of its increasing attraction, would reflect in its movement
almost wholly the economic conditions in this country. That so large a
part of the Jewish immigration, and so many of the phenomena peculiar
to it, find their explanation, for the largest part of the thirty
years, in the situation and the course of events in the countries of
Eastern Europe leads to the inevitable conclusion that the key to the
Jewish immigration is to be found not in the force of economic
attraction exercised in the United States but rather in the
exceptional economic, social and legal conditions in Eastern Europe
which have been created as a result of governmental persecution.
Reviewing the various phases of the history of Jewish immigration for
these thirty years, we are enabled to see more closely its nature. The
study of the immigration, its movement and its social and economic
characteristics, in comparison with those of other immigrant peoples,
has revealed in it a number of distinguishing traits. In the causes of
the emigration of the Jews, in the pressure exerted upon their
movement as reflected in their rate of immigration, in their family
movement, in the permanence of their settlement, and in their
occupational distribution have been found characteristics which mark
them off from the rest of the immigrant peoples. The number of these
characteristics and the degree in which they are found in the Jewish
immigration, put it in a class by itself.
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