What’s an ivory-tower social scientist to do when he looks up from his cluttered desk and realizes that a handy but obscure academic term has become a mortar round in the culture wars? “Chain migration” used to have a serviceable technical meaning. Then, anti-immigration forces–anti-legal immigration forces–now joined by President Trump decided that chain migration is a tidal wave of foreigners submerging the American Way of Life (although more Norwegians would be OK). And it did not help that Senator Durbin further confused matters by saying that the phrase hurts the feelings of African Americans whose ancestors came in chains.
Here’s what immigration scholars have meant by the term: “People immigrate to locations where they find connections and a measure of familiarity.” “Migrants who already live in the destination…. help their friends and relatives by providing them information, money, and place to stay, perhaps a job, and emotional support.”
Immigration restrictors use the term, however, to refer to a specific version of chain migration: family reconstitution, the process by which naturalized American citizens can bring in extended kin who can bring in extended kin who can… etc. The idea is that each legal immigrant will, especially once a citizen, open the door to dozens of others. In fact, this is, as is well explained by an article in Vox, a great exaggeration. Each immigrant brings in very few extended kin and even those arrivals usually take decades.
But this post is about what real chain migration brought to America over the course of our history. Here is a pretty common story: A teenage boy sails into New York City to join and room with his older sister and her husband; they had made the trip two years earlier. Not speaking English, he nonetheless quickly gets a job from another immigrant of the same origin. He lives for several years in a neighborhood that is an enclave of aliens from his home region. Years later, after much adventure, he returns a wealthy man to his city of origin and brings a wife from there back to New York. This successful man is a link in a chain of migration. This man is Fredrick Trump, the president’s grandfather. (A recent Politico story looks at the family histories of other anti-immigrant activists.)
Flows
Many newcomers to America were not links in such classic chain migration. The largest number were the roughly 400,000 Africans who were dragged here in–yes, Senator Durbin–chains. And about 250,000 Europeans came before the Revolution as either indentured servants or deported criminals, more than the number of Europeans who came freely. Over the years, also, many men arrived in labor gangs from Europe or, famously, from China to work on the intercontinental railroad.
But the great era of migration in the mid- to late-nineteenth century featured chain migrations of various sorts. (Remember that there was no regulation of immigration during this era except regarding Asians. For everyone else, the border was wide open–just sail on in–until the 1920s.) Some immigrant groups, notably the Irish and the Jews, wanted to move from Europe for good. Their typical strategy was to send a family member to the U.S. who, ideally, would connect there with some relative or former neighbor or relative of a neighbor who had landed before. The contact would help the newcomer find a place to live and to work and the just-landed immigrant would earn enough to send ticket money back for the next family members to come over. They, in turn, would do the same. Links in chains, family-and-neighborhood reconstitution chains.
One variation on this story concerns those men who came in work gangs recruited by labor contractors. They signed up with the idea of saving up and returning home as rich men. Most did go home. But many decided to stay and then brought family over or–as in the case of Fredrick Trump–went home briefly to fetch a wife. Another variant story is of Scandinavian farmers who sometimes moved en masse as communities to farming areas of the upper Midwest.
Implications
New immigrants from a particular town or set of villages would follow one another into niche locations in the U.S. and often also into niche occupations, as the earlier arrivals helped the later arrivals. Thus, U.S. cities saw the rise of Little Italies, Greektowns, Chinatowns, and the like, and some rural areas sprouted villages that looked like they had been transplanted whole from northern Europe. (More recent examples are Little Saigon and Little Havana.) Ethnic occupational specialization developed–for example, Jews in the garment industry, Italians in construction and barbering, and the Irish in policing. (More recent examples are Filipinos in personal health care and Cambodians running doughnut shops.)
Chain migration created ethnic enclaves where immigrants could find the churches, food, music, newspapers, rituals, and customs of home and enjoy them in their native languages. Indeed, European enclaves were more linguistically separated from wider American society a century ago than Latino or Asian ones are today. One prominent example is the German-only parochial and German-bilingual public schools in many “Germania” communities of the United States. Such schools lasted until anti-German hostility during World War I forced many German-Americans to hide their identities.
The cultural and linguistic enclaves that classic chain migration created also provided targets for the anti-immigration activists of the nineteenth century, including literally violent attacks on them as seedbeds of anti-Americanism (see, e.g., this and that earlier posts). But those enclaves are now sources of romantic nostalgia for their descendants, marking a time when presumably the right sorts of immigrants came and quickly assimilated–though in reality they were considered the wrong kind and did not assimilate so quickly.
There are many legitimate issues to debate about immigration policies, including how many to accept. (Few would make America Great Again by just opening all the borders as they were a century ago.) However, let us not get misled by false memories of the past in making such decisions. And, more precisely, let us appreciate that chain migration has generally been a means to successful immigration and eventual voluntary assimilation.
MADE IN AMERICA 
