“The original good-for-nothing—the community took a collection to get rid of him”: Deporting Germany's Undesirables, 1830–1875

Abstract This notation in an 1840 emigration record is just the tip of an iceberg of German attempts to export their social problems to America. During the middle third of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of such “undesirables” and thousands of genuine convicts were given free or subsidized one-way tickets to the United States. Surprising as the volume of this influx was, it is even more shocking to learn that it was entirely legal until 1875, when US federal law finally banned convicts, or 1882 when paupers were added to the list. This tolerance of “undesirables” complicates the narrative of American xenophobia, as do recruitment efforts, particularly by midwestern states, and other indirect inducements to immigration. The bulk of assisted emigrants had no criminal record, but among the deported convicts were genuinely violent offenders as well as others guilty of property crimes with the extenuating circumstances of poverty. Lacking colonies of their own for dumping grounds, nearly every German state with the exception of Prussia engaged in this practice to a greater or lesser extent. The fate of such individuals on the American side is obscured by the difficulty in tracing them. But the evidence suggests that most of them did not particularly thrive in their new environment.