The title of this conference volume is inspired by a little-known 1968 survey of German-speaking Austrian migration to the United States. The author, American diplomat E. Wilder Spaulding, chose the title to emphasize that “Austrian” immigrants had more less dissolved in the American mainstream, even though their numbers had been sizeable. As he put it in his introduction, quoted by editor Günter Bischof in the book's introduction, “[T]hey constituted—quite unlike so many other peoples who came here to shout the achievements of their homelands and their compatriots from the housetop—the quiet immigration” (9). While stressing the large numbers of “Austrian” immigrants, Spaulding (like the contributors in Bischof's volume) focused almost exclusively on German speakers, a tiny minority among “Austrian” immigrants in the United States. Most migrants from the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire who settled in the United States before 1914 came from the eastern province of Galicia and spoke Yiddish, Polish, or Ukrainian. Another sizeable group were Czech-speaking migrants from Bohemia. Migration from the post-1918 Austrian republic to the United States was not negligible, but with less than 1,000 migrants annually before the 1929 Great Depression hardly significant. Most German speakers from “Austria” who moved to the United States before World War II were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution between 1938 and 1941, followed by smaller groups of Jewish survivors and displaced persons after 1945.

Bischof quotes Spaulding's assessment without recognizing its implicit critique of those “others” (during the ethnic revival of the 1960s), let alone Spaulding's goal to promote a positive image of postwar Austria among American and other English-speaking readers. Spaulding's “Quiet Invaders” resembles so-called ethnic histories published in early twentieth-century America highlighting the achievements of members of a specific immigrant group. Spaulding devoted chapters to “Austrians in Business,” “Erudite Austrians,” but also “Practical Austrians.” As hinted previously, even in the 1960s Spaulding could not completely deny that many of the outstanding Austrian scholars, artists, writers, and business executives were Jewish and that most had moved to the United States only after the 1938 Anschluss. In the short chapter about “The Jews,” Spaulding touched on antisemitic discrimination and Nazi persecution, albeit by downplaying broad popular support for the Anschluss in Austria and widespread antisemitism among the Austrian population. Spaulding showed his true colors in the concluding section of the short chapter by harshly criticizing the already well-known Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal for creating the impression that “there have been too many Nazis in Austria.” Spaulding reminded his readers that the Nazis Wiesenthal was tracking down were “chiefly German” (E. Wilder Spaulding, Quiet Invaders Revisited: The Story of the Austrian Impact Upon America [Vienna, 1968], 102). Tellingly, Spaulding's text was published (possibly even commissioned) by the Austrian Ministry of Education.

I decided to discuss Spaulding's volume for two reasons. The editor and several authors in the essay collection refer to the 1968 volume but apparently did not read the introduction, let alone the individual chapters, critically. It would have been interesting to conceptualize the conference and essay collection as a critique of Spaulding's biased cultural propaganda piece instead of simply revisiting a title that itself is deeply problematic. The military term “invader” suggests (falsely) that immigrants were (and are) taking something that is not theirs, like the northern armies that threatened and repeatedly overwhelmed Chinese empires in the last two millennia or European colonizers in Africa and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the perception of unwanted immigrants in the United States and Europe as “invaders” who have to be excluded by walls has recently made a major impact on the public and political discourse about immigration. In fact, in the recent federal election a majority of Austrians voted for parties advocating harsh measures against unwanted immigrants. For those favoring border walls, “quiet invaders” are even more dangerous because they cannot be easily detected or kept out by conventional means, requiring a different response. Unlike the editor, several authors in volume recognize that the term “quiet invaders” is a rather unfortunate choice. Obviously, none of the migrants discussed in this volume were invaders. Unlike some of their colonial predecessors, they did not come to conquer the New World, nor did they carry arms. They were men and women looking for better opportunities or escaping persecution.

The second reason is that I struggled to devote more than a couple of sentences to an uninspiring conference volume lacking focus and a compelling agenda. The volume comprises eighteen mostly biographical essays about a wide range of “Austrian” migrants who moved to or lived for a time in the United States and Canada after 1900. Like Spaulding, Bischof decided not to define the term “Austrian,” even though some essays discuss non–German-speaking migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Burgenland province. Most authors focus on individual migrants, among them economists, Catholic priests, movie directors, writers, and entrepreneurs whose only common characteristic is that they were born in “Austria.” The obvious finding is that individual experiences question general theories about the assimilation and integration of migrants. A section on non–German-speaking “Austrian” immigrants would have provided a more differentiated understanding of the pre-1914 migration to North America. As in many studies about immigrants, those migrants who were excluded by restrictive immigration policies are not mentioned. A significant number of mostly Jewish Austrians could not move to the United States and even destinations in the Caribbean after 1938 because the US State Department categorized them as potential Nazi spies or Communist sympathizers—as quiet invaders instead of the desperate refugees they were.