Eugen von Philippovich, Die Vereinigten Staaten und die europäische Auswanderung (1893)

Eugen von Philippovich’s journal article examines the reversal of American attitudes toward European immigration and proposes an international information service as an alternative to merely restrictive policy. Its argument moves from immigration’s contribution to American development through changes in landownership, migrant composition, and industrial recruitment, then examines exclusion laws and their administrative weaknesses. The conclusion joins protection of emigrants to national competition: accurate information should reduce exploitation while strengthening Germany’s position in the worldwide movement of peoples.

Philippovich begins with the Declaration of Independence’s complaint against British obstruction of immigration and Washington’s recruitment of European contract workers. Practices subsequently prohibited had once served an urgent demand for population and labor. Immigration compressed generations of economic development into decades, supplying the workers and talents needed for settlement, industry, and cultural institutions:

Der heutige blühende Zustand der Vereinigten Staaten ist das Ergebnis der Einwanderung.

English translation: The present flourishing condition of the United States is the result of immigration.

This historical claim makes indiscriminate hostility to newcomers appear both ungrateful and economically shortsighted. Philippovich also offers an account of national integration: prosperity and civil liberty supplied the cohesion that shared language, inherited customs, and historical memory furnished in Europe. Immigrants could become Americans without a common past because they shared opportunities and interests. His account nevertheless assumes that continental settlement constituted a civilizing achievement, leaving Indigenous dispossession outside its explanatory frame.

The conditions sustaining this integration, he argues, have changed. Public agricultural land has largely passed into private ownership, while urban employment has become more important. Workers can no longer escape industrial competition simply by moving west to establish an independent homestead. The decisive distinction is between the exhaustion of available free land and the exhaustion of the country’s productive capacity:

Zwar ist die Besiedlung des Unionsgebietes nicht vollendet, aber seine Verteilung und Übertragung in Privateigentum.

English translation: Although the settlement of the Union’s territory is not complete, its distribution and transfer into private ownership are.

Landownership thus mediates the consequences of population growth. Immigration can intensify competition among wage earners even where substantial territory remains sparsely settled. This distinction later allows Philippovich to reject general overpopulation arguments without denying workers’ immediate difficulties.

His second explanation is more explicitly hierarchical. He contrasts British and German immigrants with increasing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, whom he portrays as less educated, less politically independent, and less capable of assimilation. These prejudicial national classifications are integral to his reasoning, not incidental language. Yet he simultaneously describes newcomers as victims of institutions that manufacture dependency. Cheaper transport has weakened the journey’s supposed selection for initiative, while shipping agents, employers, and labor brokers organize migration for profit rather than settlement.

The article’s substantial evidentiary middle reconstructs this recruitment economy through congressional investigations, consular reports, and testimony about garment work, cigar manufacture, and mining. Its account of Italian migration through New York’s Mulberrystreet follows inflated passage debts into lodging charges, placement fees, and compulsory purchases from labor bosses. Employers obtain replacement workers; intermediaries extract earnings; stranded migrants bear the risks. Strikebreaking recruitment shows that immigration is not simply a spontaneous response to opportunities:

Die vorstehenden Beispiele zeigen zu Genüge, daß die Vermehrung der den Amerikanern so unliebsamen und für die Lebenshaltung ihrer Arbeiterbevölkerung so gefährlichen Einwanderung durch künstliche Mittel herbeigeführt oder doch auf ihrer Höhe erhalten wird.

English translation: The preceding examples show sufficiently that the increase in immigration so unwelcome to Americans and so dangerous to the standard of living of their working population is brought about by artificial means or at least maintained at its level.

Philippovich traces legislation from New York’s passenger securities and levies to federal exclusion in 1882, the contract-labor prohibition of 1885, and subsequent extensions of enforcement. He supports preventing European authorities from exporting responsibility for people needing public assistance, while noting American failures to support their own destitute citizens abroad. Fragmented jurisdiction, hurried inspections, and limited powers after landing render prohibitions ineffective. Literacy, property, and consular certification tests likewise promise distinctions they cannot reliably establish. His account also reports a purported last-day Harrison measure; this should be understood as contemporary reported information rather than an independently established legislative fact.

Against wholesale exclusion, Philippovich invokes uneven population density, agricultural output, irrigation projects, and western demand for labor. The problem is partly distribution: migrants accumulate in cities while other regions seek workers. Border screening cannot substitute for action against exploitative brokers and the truck system, or for reliable guidance before departure.

Es sollte Jedermann möglich sein, kostenlos eine ausreichende Information über die gesetzlichen und wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen seiner künftigen Existenz zu gewinnen.

English translation: Everyone should be able to obtain, free of charge, sufficient information about the legal and economic foundations of their future livelihood.

This proposal unites European duties of care with American interests in self-preservation. European administrations would disseminate trustworthy information, while the United States would support protection for admitted immigrants. The closing appeal, however, exceeds humanitarian reform: Germany should extend its information network worldwide to sustain German communities and influence abroad. The article’s distinctive contribution lies in connecting land tenure, organized labor recruitment, and administrative knowledge; its limits lie in translating social vulnerability into ethnic hierarchies and emigrant welfare into an instrument of national competition.