“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….” These words, penned by the poet Emma Lazarus and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty in 1903, capture brilliantly two iterations of the American immigration myth. First, we like to believe that economic opportunity, available to anyone willing to work hard and behave decently, inspired millions from around the world to begin a new life in the United States. Second, America has been a haven for the repressed, a land of freedom in a world in which mobility had become a right. In her superb book, The Great Departure, Tara Zahra takes direct aim at both of these myths. She does this, paradoxically perhaps, by shifting our focus to the lands of the Habsburg monarchy, asking not only why so many millions left for the United States and other countries, but how the region's peoples and governments understood these migrations from the nineteenth century to the present. The result is a book that will challenge Americans to rethink some of our most cherished beliefs and a thoughtful, inspiring work of scholarship that has much to offer historians of our region as well.
From 1876 to 1910 more than 3.5 million citizens of Austria-Hungary emigrated abroad—this in a country that counted roughly 51 million people in the 1910 census. In part, Zahra tells us, this mass exodus resulted from the emergence of multinational shipping firms, new transport technologies, and the insatiable demand for cheap labor in places like the United States. Most important, however, desperate poverty in Galicia, Bukovina, and the southern and eastern peripheries of Hungary pushed these millions to leave home. Only rarely did visions of the American dream pull emigrants abroad. Instead, letters home often included tragic descriptions of personal isolation, financial scams, overcrowded housing, disease, and brutal work. Many emigrants returned, telling similar stories. Within the monarchy there arose anxious voices eager to stem the outflow, yet few addressed the issue of poverty. Village priests bemoaned the break-up of families and the inevitable moral decay that awaited emigrants. For nationalists, the departures threatened the nation's vitality, as measured by the vote and the census. Landowners complained about the departure of cheap labor. Habsburg officials watched nervously as potential military conscripts left the country. The War Ministry and antisemitic newspapers drummed up fraud charges against Jewish travel agents. These sham trials revealed fears that “white” Europeans from the monarchy would be treated as racially inferior, fears that were not entirely unfounded. “Whatever else one may say of the Negro,” Booker T. Washington wrote in 1910, “he is, in everything except his colour, more like the Southern white man, more willing and able to absorb ideas and the culture of the white man and adapt himself to existing conditions, than is true of any race which is now coming into this country” (67). Fourteen years later the American Immigration Act put massive restrictions on immigration from eastern and southern Europe, mostly out of concern for the country's “racial fitness.”
Questions related to freedom and mobility emerged as well. Habsburg officials attempted partial restrictions on the outflow of peoples, and many others worried that Eastern Europeans would be sold into “white slavery” and prostitution. Ironically, the emergence of multinational nation-states after World War I meant greater freedom of mobility for minorities than members of the dominant nation. Poland, for example, imposed tough passport restrictions on Poles but offered official assistance to some Ukrainians. The rise of Nazi Germany sparked a strange consensus among American experts and a host of international and humanitarian organizations to encourage Jewish emigration from Europe, leading to plans to settle Europe's Jews in places like Madagascar, British Guinea, Angola, and the Dominican Republic. It was after World War II, however, that mobility and freedom became most obviously intertwined. Here Zahra shifts her focus more pointedly to the rhetoric of migration, detailing how the 1948 United Nations Convention on Human Rights established the ability to leave your country as a human right. During the Cold War, Western leaders celebrated their own countries’ supposed freedom of mobility while castigating Communist states for their violent suppression of mobility, as embodied most starkly in the Berlin Wall. Yet echoes of the nineteenth century remained. Western countries often blurred the emerging distinction between “political” and “economic” migrants, only offering asylum to Eastern Europeans who could be counted on to be productive, laboring members of society. Communist countries drew upon long-standing fears of discrimination and “white slavery” to warn against migration to the West. Both discourses, as Zahra points out in the final chapter, took on new valences after the fall of Communism and the entry of many Eastern European countries into the European Union.
Characterized by subtle but clear argumentation as well as evocative prose, Great Departures is an extraordinary achievement. The book deploys an impressive array of primary source material—court records, government documents, letters, diaries, newspapers, and many more—drawn from archives in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, and the United States. These materials provide original insights into themes such Communist anti-migration rhetoric and build nicely on recent research in areas such as return migration and gendered understandings of migration. Most impressive, however, is Zahra's ability to trace out various iterations of the labor-migration/freedom-mobility nexuses that run through the last century and a half while forcefully demonstrating the centrality of mobility to our region's history. There is much here for scholars of migration as well, even if some might note that Zahra also completely ignores the oft-studied “pull” of ethnic communities and networks based in the United States and elsewhere. While the book does not weigh in on current U.S. immigration policy or the European refugee crisis, it will hopefully inspire students, policy makers, and citizens to reexamine these and other heated issues related to migration from a new perspective. It is, in short, a book that deserves to be widely read and widely discussed.
