Torsten Feys

Between the Public and the State: The Shipping Lobby's Strategies against US Immigration Restrictions 1882–1917

Based on Freemans model of interest group-driven migration policies, the article gives a qualitative inside look on a neglected actor during the formative years of US immigration reform. It analyzes the central role of the shipping companies in coordinating the pro-immigration campaign with and against other interest groups. Their lobbying is divided into two complementary sections: inside top-down efforts (lobbyists) to influence legislators and outside bottom-up efforts (migrant communities and the press) to mobilize the public. It assesses the importance of public opinion in their lobby campaigns and the shipping companies’ success in delaying far-reaching restrictions until 1917.

Bounding mass migration across the Atlantic: European shipping companies between U.S. border building and evasion 1860s-1920s

Bounding Mass Migration across the Atlantic: European Shipping Companies between US Border Building and Evasion (1860s–1920s) This article questions the assumption that the rhetoric, laws and border controls to restrict immigration into the United States originated on the Pacific border to exclude Asians and were later transferred to the Atlantic border to limit European migration. To demonstrate that two separate immigration regimes had developed, I use the much-neglected perspective of passenger shipping companies as key actors in the development of border enforcement. As still relevant today, the authorities used transport companies as an integrated part of their border control system, yet at the same time this put them in a privileged position to help their clients pass or even evade controls. The article starts with contextualising the commercial interests behind maritime migrant transport and migration policies. It then analyses the implementation of border controls at the maritime front doors, and subsequently discusses how these had been evaded. Finally, this paper discusses how border controls had first spread from the US ports of entry to the northern and southern land borders and European hubs of departure, before finally consolidating into a frontier at the Mexican-American border, which divided the core from the periphery. I question the conception of a national border policy by clearly differentiating the Pacific and Atlantic border regimes, within which there were important local differences.

Borders and Frontiers in Global and Transnational History: Introduction

1 State-of-the-art overviews include A. Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future, New York, 2013, 2; P.Y. Saunier, Transnational History, Basingstoke, 2013. 2 E.g. on nations: M. McGerr, «The Price of the ‹New Transnational History›», in: American Historical Review 96 (1991) 4, 1056–1067. On Europe: P. Nielsen, «What, Where and Why is Europe? Some Answers from Recent Historiography», in: European History Quarterly 40 (2010) 4, 701–713. On world systems: E. Vanhaute, «Who is Afraid of Global History? Ambitions, Pitfalls and Limits of Learning Global History», in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20 (2009) 2, 22–39. 3 «The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: Guidelines for Contributors» (May 9, 2005). The authors possess a copy. P.Y. Saunier, «Learning by Doing: Notes about the Making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History», in: Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008) 2, 159–180. 4 D. Shao, «Borders and Borderlands», in: A. Iriye/ P.Y. Saunier (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, Basingstoke, 2009, 99–102. A. Knotter, «Perspectives on Cross-Border Labor in Europe» in: Journal of Borderlands Studies 29 (2014) 33, 319–326. In the last 25 years or so, global and transnational history have grown into an incontrovertible research agenda that investigates how all sorts of circulations, entanglements, and connections shaped modern history.1 At the same time, this research agenda has been criticised for underestimating the continued relevance of studying historically important formations such as the nation-state, Europe or world systems, which persist – despite a cavalcade of connections – piercing their boundaries.2 How does one combine the historical study of connections with that of long-standing units of historical analysis such as nations, regions or world systems? To answer that question, this special issue takes borders and frontiers as its point of departure. So far, global and transnational history have been predominantly addressed borders from a connection perspective. For instance, the contributors to the influential Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History were asked to investigate the «circulation of people, ideas and objects across national boundaries, with the structures that support these flows and with different scales across which structures and flows operate.»3 Transnational history has also drawn from borderland studies, which fittingly investigates borders as zones (not lines) of intense interaction and connection: According to the so-called «border paradox», borders trigger legal and illegal cross-border flows by virtue of the separations they create.4 Erik van der Vleuten / Torsten Feys

Steamshipping Companies and Transmigration Patterns: the Use of European Cities as Hubs during the Era of Mass Migration to the US

The article gives a business perspective on the development of transit routes during the long nineteenth century transatlantic migration from Europe to the US. It first stresses that due to the economic interests generated by transatlantic migrant transport the political economy behind early migration policies centred much more on how people moved rather than who was doing the moving. These had a lasting impact on transit routes. With nationalism on the rise and economic liberalism declining, measures to direct transmigrants to national ports and companies radicalised. Against this background and to neutralise competitive pressures shipping companies united in cartels to protect established routes. Their perspective gives new insights on how transit routes developed; on transit costs; the service it included and the quality thereof. It explains how shipping lines extended their services in port-cities and inland transport hubs to guarantee a smooth transit as an integrated part of their trade.

Transience, Overseas Migration and the Modern European City. Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Cities and Overseas Migration in the Long Nineteenth Century’

Migration is one of key factors to the existence of which we owe the emergence of the modern urban condition that continues to shape the life of large populations today. Precisely the same reasons that generated great urban growth of European cities in the late nineteenth century were responsible for concurrent mass migration overseas – to North America and elsewhere – for a number of reasons. Given the everyday experience of the mass of transient migrants passing through these cities that lasted for decades, the lack of interest on behalf of urban historians to this large and heterogeneous group is surprising. Analysing such transient migrant spaces and routes, and their diverse actors at the city level for some of the most important transit points within the European continent (Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Budapest) as well as for select ports of departure (Bremen, Hamburg, Liverpool, Marseille and Rotterdam), this special issue aims to link the recent attention to transmigration within migration history to urban history thereby highlighting the relevance of transit cities to the study of overseas migration.

East European Jewish migrants and settlers in Belgium, 1880–1914: a transatlantic perspective

This article analyses whether the Jews leaving Tsarist Russia and the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, part of the transatlantic mass migration of the end of the nineteenth century, became subject to state control. Most emigrants from Eastern Europe in this period passed through the ports of Bremen, Hamburg and Antwerp. In the 1880s only a few emigrants were not welcome in America and sent back to Europe, but economic competition and the supposed health threat immigrants posed meant the US became the trendsetter in implementing protectionist immigration policy in the 1890s. More emigrants were returned to Europe because of the newly erected US federal immigration control stations, but many more were denied the possibility to leave for the United States by the remote control mechanism which the American authorities enforced on the European authorities and the shipping companies. At the Russian–German border and the port of Antwerp, shipping companies stopped transit migrants who were deemed medically unacceptable by American standards. The shipping companies became subcontractors for the American authorities as they risked heavy fines if they transported unwanted emigrants. The Belgian authorities refused to collaborate with the Americans and defended their sovereignty, and made shipping companies in the port of Antwerp solely responsible for the American remote migration control. Due to the private migration control at the port of Antwerp transit migrants became stuck in Belgium. The Belgian authorities wanted these stranded migrants to return “home.” It seems that the number of stranded migrants remained manageable as the Belgian authorities did not make the shipping companies pay the bill. They were able to get away by making some symbolic gestures and these migrants were supported by charitable contributions from the local Jewish community.