Germany’s Journey From Emigration Country to Immigration Destination

Benjamin Franklin once condemned German migrants in language that could sound like a modern attack on refugees. He complained that Germans might “swarm into our Settlements,” preserve their own language and customs, and refuse to adopt those of their new country. The target of his criticism, however, was not a contemporary asylum-seeker population. It was Germans who had emigrated to America in the 18th century.

The article places today’s German anxiety over uncontrolled immigration against that earlier history of migration. The promise of a better life drove countless people to leave their homelands, including the Germans who crossed the Atlantic during Franklin’s lifetime. By 1820, about 150,000 had made the journey successfully.

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Why should they be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?

Many prospective migrants heard glowing stories from compatriots who described rapid prosperity in America. Those recruiters, the article notes, often received a commission for each person they persuaded to leave. The voyage itself cost roughly a tradesman’s annual earnings, according to Simone Blaschka of the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven. Families frequently had to sell everything they owned to pay for passage.

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The crossing on a sailing ship cost about what a tradesman would earn in a year.

The crossing lasted several weeks. Passengers were packed below deck in cramped conditions and faced bedbugs, fleas and rats, while dysentery, typhoid, smallpox and scurvy spread among them. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a schoolmaster and organist, wrote that many passengers cried for home and that hundreds died and were thrown into the sea.

For migrants who could not pay, free passage came at the price of years of bonded labor. On arrival, Mittelberger said, their contracts were sold, families were separated and parents were forced to sell their children. At the same time, another wave of German emigration moved east after Catherine the Great, a German-born Russian empress, issued a manifesto on July 22, 1763, inviting settlers to cultivate uninhabited farmland.

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Many people whimper, sigh and cry piteously for their homes; most of them get home-sick. Many hundred people necessarily die and perish in such misery, and must be cast into the sea.