Immigration.—How much does the United States owe to immigration, as regards the growth of population? Frederick Knapp, worked out a table covering the period from 1790 to1860, the beginning of the Civil War, intended to show what the normal white population at the close of each decade would have been as a result of only the surplus of births over deaths of 1.38percent each year, compared with the result as established by the official census figures.

The natural increase of the white population in 160years would have been only 5,203,952, whereas it was 24,257,732, an increase of 19,053,780 over the natural growth. Statistics show that in 1790 an American family averaged5.8; in1900 but4.6. During the earlier period each family averaged 2.8children, in1900 but1.53, a decline of nearly 50per cent.

Wilhelm Kaufmann (“Die Deutschen im Am. Burgerkriege,”) makes an ingenious calculation of the value of the immigration of the nineteenth century to the U.S. in dollars and cents. Fifty years ago, he says, a human being had a market price. An adult slave about 1855 was valued at an average of $1,100. Estimating, for the sake of argument, a white immigrant at the same price, the 19,500,000 immigrants for the stated period would represent a value of $21,450,000,000; but as a white man performed three times as much work as a slave, besides having a larger claim on life and a much higher intelligence, a white immigrant represented four times the value of a slave. What value, for instance, was an Ericson to the Union army in the summer of1862, or a Lieber, a Schurz, a Mergenthaler or a Carnegie? But 22percent of the total immigration was made up of children under 15years of age. According to the New York Immigration authorities (1870) every German immigrant averaged a possession of$150 cash on his arrival, representing a total value, as regards German immigration alone, of $750,000,000. A famous English economist says: “One of the imports of the U.S., that of the adult and trained immigrants, would be in an economic analysis underestimated at £100,000,000 ($500,000,000) a year.”—Thorold Rogers, Lectures in1888, “Economic Interpretations of History,” (p.407). And the American, James Ford Rhodes (Vol.I, p.355): “The South ignored, or wished to ignore, the fact that able-bodied men with intelligence enough to wish to better their conditions are the most valuable products on earth, and that nothing can redound more to the advantage of a new country than to get men without having been at the cost of rearing them.”

Because the working conditions in Germany were exceptionally favorable, immigration from the German Empire before the war had reached by far the smallest stage of that of any of the leading nations, save France, where the birthrate has been stationary for many years. The figures for1914 were only 35,734, while the immigration from Greece was 35,832; Italian immigration in that year reached a total of 283,738 and from Russia 255,660, while England sent us 35,864, Scotland 10,682 and Wales 2,183. In1915 only 7,799 Germans arrived, while England sent us 21,562. The money brought by the Germans totaled $1,786,130, or $221.50 a head, while money brought by the English totaled $3,467,458, a little over $160 a head.

German immigration was never a pauper immigration and of itself refutes the assertion that German immigration was due to fear of military service or political oppression.

The first German immigration from the Palatinate, 237years ago, was mainly due to the criminal ravages of the French under LouisXIV; that of1848 was incident mainly to the revolution in Baden, based upon a longing of all thinking Germans for a united Germany, and that of the subsequent period was the spontaneous outpouring of an overpopulated country not yet adjusted to commercial and industrial expansion and the great spread of German enterprise in ship-building and manufacture. As soon as this development had reached a decisive stage, immigration practically ceased. Those who came here obeyed a great economic law by which every man seeks to supply an existing vacancy for his industry; they did not come as beggars, but were welcomed because they were needed. There was no religious oppression in Germany, and in Prussia Frederick the Great proclaimed in the middle of the eighteenth century the doctrine, “In my country every man can serve God in his own way.” If immigration is an infallible sign of the dissatisfaction of the immigrant with conditions at home which drives him to go to another country, the fact that less than 36,000 German immigrants arrived in America in1914 against a total of 73,417 from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, proves that conditions were vastly better in Germany than in the United Kingdom. (The figures are from the “New York World Almanac” for1916.)

Anthony Arnoux gives the following table of the total German immigration into the United States for five years, from1908 to1912:

The latest statistics available, made public in December, 1919, place the total number of immigrants arriving at American ports for the past 100years at 33,200,103.

For the fiscal year ending in June, 1919, 237,021 immigrants were admitted and 8,626 were turned back, a net total of 245,647. During the same period 216,231 immigrants left the country. The immigrants arriving totaled a per capita wealth of$112, a total of $15,831,247. Foreign-born soldiers serving in the army during the war were given citizenship to the number of 128,335.