Overseas Migration Consequences: The Case of Poles Returning from the USA, 1880–1924

Abstract

A significant number of the Polish emigrants who left for the USA between 1880 and 1914 considered their stay in America as a temporary one. People went across the Ocean ‘to make their pile of kreutzers’, ‘to buy a farm to run’ in Poland.¹ In their intention to return, Poles were similar to the majority of groups coming to America from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in the 1880s, the 1890s and subsequent years.² In the period immediately before the Frist World War, return migration and circulation were frequent phenomena.³ In the USA these people were called ‘birds of passage’. C. Golab, setting them in the context of the Atlantic economy, uses a term ‘migrant workers’.⁴ From the existing data the calculation can be made that returns reached about 30 per cent of the emigration.⁵ The size of the return migration seems to have been determined by the economic situation in the USA. A bigger wave of returnees was observed during years of economic crises. That was the case in the years 1884–5, 1894–5, 1904 and 1907–8.⁶ Obviously, the decision to return was also determined by other factors, connected both with the country of emigration and the territory of the USA, as well as by personal factors. Homesickness,⁷ calculations and expectations evoked by gossip and news coming from the Old Country, problems in adapting to new conditions, or barriers which the immigrants encountered in their attempts to move upward, all inclined people to leave the New World.