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Sample Student final exam answers 2018 (2018 final exam assignment) Part 3: Model Research Reports |
LITR 4340
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Greg Bellomy
They’re Coming to America, but Why?
Immigration has always been a part of the United States’
identity and history. This legacy, though widely the subject of contemporary
debate, remains as an element of American society to this very day. While
immigration has been one of the few constants in US history, the people who have
decided to chance the journey into American society have been as diverse as
their stated causes for choosing to come here. While our society and its methods
of discourse have changed, it seems that the ultimate driver of immigration is
generally economic in nature and may have always been since the beginning.
With regards to the colonial period of
American History, the most commonly espoused narrative today is that people came
to the New World primarily seeking religious freedoms. When considering the
Puritan and Calvinist religious identities of the first wave of American
settlers, this idea seems to hold water. The famous writings of John Winthrop
and Roger Williams seem to prove this assumption of religious cause to their
purpose (particularly in 17th Century New England). While the people
who chose to leave their homes in Europe and the British Isles may have
absolutely seen themselves in these terms, the fact remains that the
fingerprints of corporate and business interests are on even the earliest
voyages of American settlement. Another way of saying this is that during the
first wave of American immigration, no religious group ever made the trip
without first having an alliance with a corporate or business interest.
One of the less remembered aspects of
American immigrant history is that of indentured servitude. The nations of
Western Europe were becoming increasingly subject to overcrowding, competition,
and individual scarcities (such as that of money, in poverty). Juxtaposed
against this backdrop, the New World seemed to promise infinite promise to
people who were impoverished, particularly in terms of land and opportunity. The
untapped wealth of the North Americas allowed individual immigrants the
opportunity to parlay their labor for the opportunity of ownership, which was
generally prohibited by traditions of status and the realities of economics on
the European Continent and in England. The contracts entailed promising labor
for an extended time, usually between two and seven years, during which the
individual would serve a master. At the end of the arrangement, the servant
would regain their free status and be rewarded with some wealth or property. A
key feature of the arrangement was that indentured servants would be housed and
fed at their contractor’s expense, which facilitated people making the voyage
and contract with no wealth at all.
The process allowed those who would become indentured servants to market the
most valuable aspects of themselves to people who could profit from them. This
idea was explored by Ran Abromvitzky and Fabio Braggion in the article,
“Migration and Human Capital: Self-Selection of Indentured Servants in the
Americas,” which was published by the
Journal of Economic History in December of 2006.
The two men investigate the terms of labor in these contracts to see
reflected value of the contract; in doing so, they found that the indentured
servants bound for the American continent had more valuable contracts than those
bound for the Indies (884). The authors suggest that the differing value of
servitude contracts may have affected the diverging economic growth between the
American continent and British settlements in the West Indies.
Eventually, though, the practice of
indentured servitude was displaced by even cheaper and more profitable labor
arrangements. These economic pressures are explored in Allison Madar’s
“Servitude in the 18th‐century
British Atlantic World: Old Paradigms and New Directions,” published in
History Compass in November of 2017.
In this essay, Madar investigates the various forms of “unfreedom” that
permeated early American culture. She points out how the Transportation Act,
passed by the British Parliament in 1718 started the flow of prisoners to the
New World as free labor for plantations and other affiliated businesses (1).
Because her focus was more about the experiences of individuals than economic
history, Madar does not investigate who profited from this new source of free
labor. Instead, she calls for a diversification of servant experiences in the
new world, since they include debtors, prisoners, and most significantly, racial
slaves. All these factors, especially racial slavery, had the effect of
cheapening labor for those who could profit from it.
In the economic sense that slavery enables some people to
profit at the direct expense of others, it is and has always been a danger to
society. Whereas it seems to be human nature to accept practices and
institutions because of their proliferation, abolitionist voices in history tend
to improve our hopes and conceptions of how people ought to act, even in the
face of opposition. John Woolman’s journal from 1760 is a shining example of
people standing up for what they believe is right. As a deeply religious and
sympathetic man, he seems to have taken every opportunity he could find to fight
the institution of slavery. As a deeply spiritual person, he seems to have
understood how destructive the institution was to all people associated with it.
Likewise, he had a sense of a general sense of injustice that included legally
free men; “Being often weary, I was prepared to sympathize with those whose
circumstances in life, as free men, required constant labor to answer the
demands of their creditors…” (68). Just the same, this quote demonstrates that
even back in the 18th Century, people on the ground recognized that
many people were only free in name. In this way, it seems that the freedom of
choice that we generally attribute to the immigrants of the 17th and
18th Centuries may not have been nearly as common as typically
thought. The preoccupation with labor and opportunity to profit from it remain
as a topic of conversation about American immigration in later centuries.
One of the more interesting and
applicable readings that I found in my research on this topic is “the Causes of
Earlier European Immigration to the United States,” written by Thomas Walker
Page and published in the October, 1911 edition of
the Journal of Political Economy.
Page writes of the issues the motivations of European immigrants that “Strong,
however, as was the influence of religious and political discontent, a much
greater importance attaches to the economic motives for European emigration”
(678). A short time later in the article, the author cites an article in the
1851 Edinburgh Review as blaming
stagnant economies, underdeveloped middle classes, population growth, enabled by
stability and complacency following the Napoleonic Wars as the primary cause of
emigration from Ireland and the German states. Impressively, Page dismisses this
assertion, saying:
“But
it does not tell the whole truth; for during the generation it refers to we had
been receiving a large immigration from England, the home of capital and the
leading industrial nation of the world; a nation, at the same time, where urban
squalor, factory riots, and widespread destitution, and the excessive rates of
taxation for poor-relief, revealed in exaggerated form many of the evils
attributed in the other countries to overpopulation” (679).
In truly and traditionally American fashion, Page blames
the unequal distribution of wealth and the legislation which enables such
disparity in quality of living and expectations of representation.
In light of recent American political
and economic developments, it is both inspiring and ridiculous to look back on
the writings of Thomas Walker Page. The timing of his article (the year 1911)
almost serves as a high-water mark for traditional American libertarianism.
While this point is chronologically after the Spanish-American war and the
beginning of the permanent policy of American Imperialism, it is forever perched
at a time most marked by an American obsession with military and political
isolationism. This, too, matches
with the libertarian dream that government should be confined to the smallest of
possible roles, as this is most conducive to happy and free life among men (and
women, though admittedly after this change in policy). Of course, the United
States changed drastically only a short time after his writing of the article.
My investigation of the economic causes
of immigration to the United States feels like a mild success. In many ways, I
have confirmed my preexisting belief that people generally do what they feel is
necessary to make ends meet in an increasingly pecuniary world. In this sense,
it seems just to dispense with our nationalistic and idealized conceptions of
freedom being intrinsic to the experience of American immigrants who were not
already wealthy. Along the way, though, I have found that nearly every
researcher who looks into these economic factors that inspired migration to
North America has had to deal with similar issues – primarily, that the way we
collectively imagine our past hampers our ability to understand it.
Works Cited:
Abramitzky, Ran, and Fabio
Braggion. "Migration and Human Capital: Self-Selection of Indentured Servants to
the Americas." The Journal of Economic
History, vol. 66, no. 4, 2006, pp. 882-905.
Madar, Allison. "Servitude in
the 18th‐century
British Atlantic World: Old Paradigms and New Directions."
History Compass, vol. 15, no. 11,
2017, pp. n/a.
Page, Thomas W. "The Causes of Earlier European
Immigration to the United States."
Journal of Political Economy, vol. 19, no. 8, 1911, pp. 676-693.
Woolman, John. Excerpts from
journals posted on Dr. White’s coursesite: (http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/Quakers/WoolmanJrnl.htm)
