Broadly speaking, the causes
of Polish immigration have been political, religious, and economic. While
economic conditions have been the direct cause, it must be borne in mind that
the indirect causes, political and religious, are quite as potent as the
economic. Prussianizing, which lately has assumed a religious as well as a
political aspect, renders the progress of Prussian Poland distasteful to the
Poles, because whatever progress is made must be along Prussian lines. The Kulturkampf gave the American Poles many
of their noblest priests, through whose influence thousands of Poles came to
America. While Prussianizing by means of class legislation, expropriation, and
colonization has not been very rapid, its methods have been attended with a
certain measure of success. The economic prosperity of Western Germany has
checked the emigration of Prussian Poles from the empire, and the Poles already
form an important and growing part of the population of Westphalia and the
Rhenish provinces.
Russian Poland experiences
the full force of militarism, but still more important as a cause of emigration
is the state of terrorism in the great manufacturing districts of Russian
Poland, aggravated by the Russo-Japanese War. The mentally more alert are
emigrating from Russian Poland, mostly young men who, under the constant strain
of Government repression, are the first to be drawn into the revolutionary
propaganda and have developed exaggerated notions concerning social wrongs. It
is mostly from this class that Socialism in America draws its Polish recruits. A
condition responsible for much of the emigration from Poland is the persecution
of the Jews in Russia proper, and the Government's policy of concentrating its
Jewish problem within "the Kingdom", which has been constituted a vast pale
whither the Jews are being forced until they are overflowing into Galicia. By
granting autonomy to communities in which the Jews are numerically strong, the
Government is effectually expatriating the Poles by what amounts to
disfranchisement, and thus Polish progress is blocked. The Poles were never a
commercial people, and under present conditions they abandon all trade and
commerce to the Jews. About 35 per cent of the population of Warsaw and about 31
per cent of that of Cracow are Jews. They have control of Poland's industry,
commerce, and agriculture. Industry receives poor reward, taxation of the poor
is oppressive, and education in Russian Poland is positively discouraged. Since
the beginnings of Galician emigration land values in Galicia have advanced
fourfold. The abandonment of the feudal system, whereby one child received the
family holding intact, the decreasing death-rate, and the high birth-rate, have
cut the peasant's acre into tiny patches, which under most careful cultivation
are insufficient for a population of 241 to the square mile, especially in
Western Galicia. Polish emigration is constantly stimulated by the steamship
agencies, which form a network of newspapers, petty officials, and innkeepers;
cheapness of transportation and the accounts from America of better conditions
add greatly to its tide. The annual emigration to the industrial regions of
Germany tends to mitigate the extreme poverty of the peasants, which heretofore
rendered emigration impossible. Poverty and not patriotism is at the bottom of
all present-day Polish emigration. Memories of European conditions are an
important factor in causing the Poles in the United States to forget any
intention they may have had of returning to the mother country.