Italian Migrants in the United States, 1820-1945

Migrating from Italy

Italy has traditionally been a crossroad of cultures and a place characterized by in- and out-flows of people. Unified as a nation-state in 1861, only a couple of decades later Italy experienced a mass outflow, which till the early 1920s progressively led millions to leave the country. The United States was a main recipient of Italians to the extent that – according to Roger Daniels – from 1820 to 1920 around 4,200,000 moved overseas, with circa two millions leaving their homeland between 1901 and 1910, departing in particular from Southern Italy.

During the nineteenth century, and before the outbreak of mass migration, only a few thousand skilled peoples (mainly from Northern Italy), such as actors, sculptors, stone-cutters, doctors, pharmacists, peddlers, and plaster figurine makers left Italy. In the same period, Southern peasants began to emigrate overseas for seasonal work, while the failure of a few insurrectionist plots, aimed at achieving Italy’s liberation from foreign dominance and the unification of the country, led some patriotic activists to flee to the US.

Those departing Italy during the age of mass migration were mostly unskilled and barely educated peasants. Some reasons account for this massive exodus from a country in which internal mobility had traditionally characterized the daily life of many. First, a demographic boom that caused problems in feeding a growing population. This was further affected by a job shortage. In the South, the presence of semi-feudal social hierarchies marginalized many peasants to the lowest levels of rural society and often obliged them to move on a daily basis in search of work. Italy had a predominantly rural economy which was heavily impacted by recurrent agricultural crises, which damaged the production of wheat (overcome by the availability of cheaper wheat produced in the United States and the Russian empire), corn, rye, oats and hemp (which also faced American competition). Furthermore, the phylloxera plant parasite heavily damaged vineyards and affected wine production. In Southern Italy – where major landowners were unwilling to improve agricultural techniques on lands already impoverished by prolonged and intensive cereal crop cultivation – the situation was worsened by factors including high taxes; reduction of export of citrus fruit to the US (due to production in Florida and California) and the setting up of high tariffs in France, which cut off a major market from the grape growers of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily. In Northern Italy a fragile industrial system was unable to absorb the surplus workforce and at the same time it altered the local rural social structure. Traditional seasonal migrations could no longer support the employment of peasant communities in the areas of Veneto, the Alps, sub-Alps and the Po Valley. Such communities were also affected by the abrogation of common rights on pastures and woods, as well as by a worsening of terms to manage the land.