1830s-early 1900s. During this period, annual European migration to North America increased to about one million.
The pattern of migration from the 1830s to the 1850s--both external migration of Europeans into the U.S. and the internal migration within the U.S.--explains the victory of the liberal North over the illiberal South in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Because of the greater population of the North, the Union army was always at least twice as large as the Confederate army. And this was largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South. The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work. As Abraham Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144). In 1858, Lincoln had stated the liberal definition of liberty as the principle that "each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights" (1989, 1:449). Lincoln thought the Civil War was a practical test of whether any nation dedicated to such a principle of equal liberty could long endure.
Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North. Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South. Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million. The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81). The number of Union soldiers was also increased, beginning in 1863, by the recruitment of emancipated slaves as soldiers. By the end of the war, there were as many as many as 200,000 black Union soldiers. This illustrates how migration as cultural group selection favors liberal regimes.
1882. One of the groups that benefited from the long period of virtually open borders for the U.S. was Chinese people who immigrated to California to work as miners during the Gold Rush and then to become railroad workers. This provoked anti-Chinese bigotry in America. In 1882, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. This was the first immigration law directed against a particular ethnic or national group of people.
1914-1918. The World War of 1914-1918 created increased suspicion of foreigners and restrictions on freedom of movement that led many countries to establish the first requirements for identity papers, passports, and visas for travel. Many people noticed that this was a radical change from the free movement and migration that was possible before 1914. The Austrian author Stefan Zweig lamented this:
Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without a passport and without ever having seen one. . . . Nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after World War I than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights (Goldin, 2024, 140).
1916. The first edition of Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, Or the Racial Basis of European History was published in 1916. Grant was the preeminent conservationist and eugenicist of his time. In The Passing of the Great Race, he laid out his evolutionary anthropology of the "Nordic race" as superior to all other human races. He warned that the Nordic race in America was being replaced by immigrants from non-Nordic Europe and that the Nordic race was being outbred by inferior racial stocks. Grant agreed with Arthur Gobineau in dividing mankind into three distinct races: Caucasoids (based in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia), Negroids (based in Sub-Saharan Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Central and Eastern Asia). But Grant subdivided Caucasoids into Teutonic Nordics, Slavic Alpines, and Mediterraneans. The Nordics had evolved in a harsh Northern European climate that made them a tough, virile race capable of conquering weaker races.
To preserve Nordic America from replacement and extinction, Grant proposed severe restrictions on migration (both the external migration of non-Nordic Europeans to America and the internal migration of American blacks from the American South into the Northern States). He also proposed laws for sterilizing people from inferior races and prohibiting miscegenation. He succeeded on most of these points. Many states passed forced sterilization laws. The U.S. Congress accepted his proposals for quotas on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. He supported the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in Virginia, which made it a crime for white people to marry or interbreed with black people (defined by the "one-drop rule"). Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Grant praising him for his book and saying that this book had become "my Bible."
1924. The U.S. Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol and passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (or Johnson-Reed Act). Following the recommendations of Madison Grant and others, the proponents of this act were explicit in stating that its purpose what to protect the ethnic homogeneity of America from being corrupted by foreign races. It established a quota system that prohibited Asian immigration and severely limited Jewish and Catholic immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, while favoring white Protestant immigrants from Northwestern Europe. The Act was endorsed by eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan (which was at the peak of its power in the 1920s).
Hitler praised the law in Mein Kampf: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects, America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic volkisch conception of the state." In another writing, Hitler explained:
That the American Union feels itself to be a Nordic-German state and by no means an international Volker-porridge is also revealed by the apportionment of immigration quotas among the European Volker. Scandinavians, that is to say, Swedes, Norwegians, furthermore Danes, then Englishmen and finally Germans have been accorded the largest contingent. Latins and Slavs receive very little, and the Japanese and Chinese are groups that one would prefer to exclude entirely (Whitman, 2017, 46-47).
1933-1945. On April 7, 1933, two months after Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi government became the first government to formalize the term Aryan in national legislation: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service declared that only Aryans could be civil servants, and Aryans were defined as those without Jewish parents or grandparents. This "Aryan Paragraph" subsequently entered many racial laws. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws required "proof of Aryan ancestry" as a prerequisite for Reich citizenship. From this point on, until Germany's defeat in 1945, the Nazi Regime enforced a fundamental distinction between Aryans, who were the superior race with the right to be free, and Jews, who were the inferior race with no right to be free or even to live.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "Aryan" as "a member of the group of prehistoric peoples thought to have spoken proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical language from which Indo-European languages are believed to derive." The word "Aryans" was coined by historical linguists in the 19th century based on the Sanskrit word arya. In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, composed between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses and secures their land for his people, the arya. When linguists noticed the similarities between Sandskrit, Greek, and Latin, they speculated that Sandskrit was derived from some prehistoric, now-lost proto-language from which all of the Indo-European languages had derived. They also inferred that the mythological story in the Rig Veda of the Indus-Valley Civilization being invaded by the arya was historically true--that it conveyed a memory of how migrants from the north and west speaking Indo-European languages had horses and chariots that allowed them to conquer the Indus Valley Civilization and spread their languages. These Aryan invaders (perhaps distinguished by their light skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair) then migrated across much of Western Eurasia, reaching as far as the British Isles and Scandinavia. Toward the end of the 19th century, this "Aryan Invasion Theory" was fused with anti-semitism, so that Aryans as the master race were seen as fighting against the Jews as the most powerful of the inferior races (Poliakov, 1974).
As we have seen, Hitler adopted much of this as part of his Nazi ideology. If you look at the text of Hitler's Mein Kampf (first published in 1925), you can see that Hitler used the term "Aryan" forty-nine times. Of the three kinds of human beings--"founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture"--the Aryans belonged to the first group, who subjugated the inferior races and turned their physical powers under Aryan leadership towards building great cultures. The threat to Aryan dominance is interbreeding with inferior races so that the purity of Arian blood is lost, and that's why the Jews promote interbreeding: "The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."
The Nazis invested heavily in archaeological projects that would show that the Germanic culture of northern Europe was responsible for most of the achievements of Western civilization. Maps in archaeological publications from 1933 to 1945 showed the Germanic homeland as the center for the diffusion of Aryan/Endo-European culture with lines of migration to the west, south, and east. This archaeological history was used to justify the conquest of Poland and Czechoslovakia so that "racially pure" Germans could reclaim the lands that they had originally settled thousands of years ago (Arnold, 1992).
As we have seen, ancient DNA research has now decisively refuted these ideas. First, the "homeland" of the Aryan Endo-Europeans was not Germany but the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya culture in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas. Second, there are no "pure" races because all human populations are genetic mixtures, including the Yamnaya population (Reich, 2018).
The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the "leadership principle," eugenics, and genocide. But Richard Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence against inferior races (Weikart, 2009).
But as I have argued, Weikart is wrong in saying that this shows a direct line of influence from Darwin and evolutionary science to Hitler. Evolutionary science--such as ancient DNA research--has refuted Hitler's racist ethics. And although Darwin had no understanding of genetics, he did understand that the unity of the human species--which we can now see as based on the genetic mixing in the history of the species--refutes any arguments for slavery or racism. That's why Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who cheered when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
But now, as I look back over my brief summary of Hitler's racial anthropology, I am reminded of Leo Strauss's warning that it is a mistake to take the Nazi racial ideology too seriously because it is nothing more than "pedantic follies." What really attracted the German people to Nazism was not the intellectual doctrines about Aryan supremacy but the promise that the buildup of Nazi armament and aggressive Nazi diplomacy would solve all of Germany's problems with a short and decisive war. A Nazi victory in war would prove the real Nazi doctrine "that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays." That doctrine is "subject to the test of sense-experience"--by what we can see with our own eyes on the battlefield. And so the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the trial of Nazi leaders after the war for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the post-war establishment of a new liberal international order were "the refutation of the Nazi doctrine." If might makes right, then the Nazis were proven wrong.
1939. In 1939, Madhev Sadashive Golwalker--an Indian who was a leader of Hindu nationalism against British colonial rule--published We, or the Nationhood Defined. Under the term "Hindutva" ("Hinduness"), which had been coined by V. D. Savarkar in 1922, Golwalker argued for the creation of an independent Hindu nation-state inhabited by a homogeneous Hindu population unified in religion and culture. But while Savarkar had identified the Hindu race as a mixture of the Aryans who had conquered India with other peoples of the Indian subcontinent, Golwalker rejected the Aryan migration theory and insisted that the Hindus were the indigenous people of India who constituted a pure race with no mixture of Aryan blood. From his study of Fascism and Nazism, he saw the power of a nationalism rooted in the racial purity of an indigenous people who had never been conquered by any other people (Bergunder, 2004).
This rejection of the Aryan migration theory has become a fundamental theme of the Hindu nationalism whose influence has grown beginning in the 1980s. In 1980, the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was founded. And since 2014, Narendra Modi, a member of BJP, has been the Prime Minister of India. Since 1981, Sita Ram Goel has run a publishing house named "Voice of India" that publishes books and pamphlets promoting Hindu nationalism and attacking the Aryan Invasion Theory as a threat to Hindu national identity. Consequently, there has been an intense public debate among scholars over the "Indo-Aryan Controversy" (Bryant and Patton, 2005). The Hindu nationalists favor an "Out of India" Theory that asserts that the Indo-Aryans originated in the Punjab region of India, that they migrated out of the Punjab, and that all the Indo-European languages originated from Sanskrit. Contrary to the claim of the Nazis, the Aryan homeland is not in Germany but in northern India.
The fundamental problem here has been well-stated by Michael Witzel: "The search for an Indo-European homeland has taken us some two hundred years by now. The discussion can easily be summarized, if somewhat facetiously, by: the homeland is at, or close to the homeland of the author of the book in question" (Witzel, 2019).
And yet, as I've suggested, the ancient DNA evidence indicates that the Indo-European homeland is found neither in the German nationalist homeland nor in the Hindu nationalist homeland but in the ancient Eurasian steppe homeland of the Yamnaya (Reich, 2018).
1965. When Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, it overturned the racist national quota system of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and thus allowed a much freer immigration process with less discrimination based on racial and national identity. This bill was passed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was seen as part of that movement towards securing the equal liberty of all human beings as including what Frederick Douglass had called "the right of migration." President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The ultimate aim of those behind Donald Trump's restrictive immigration and deportation policies--people like Stephen Miller--is to overturn this 1965 law and return to something like the 1924 law.
1967. In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's law against interracial marriage (the law that Madison Grant had supported) as an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. (And isn't this one of the most aptly named Supreme Court cases?) As I have said in previous posts, this settled the long-running debate over whether the emancipation of slaves would allow racial interbreeding and thus deny the "purity" of the separate races. This decision also established a general right to marriage that would later support a constitutional right to same-sex marriage (in Obergefell v. Hodges [2015]). This also illustrates how migration necessarily leads to interbreeding and thus racial mixture.
1969. On July 20, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first human beings to land on the Moon and then--the next day--walk on the Moon. They were on the Moon's surface for a little over 21 hours before returning to Earth. For the first time in history, human beings had migrated, if only briefly, from the Earth to another astronomical body. In 1969, NASA had plans for eventually establishing a permanent settlement on the Moon and then going to Mars in the 1980s. But since the last crewed moon landing in December of 1972, no human beings have landed on the Moon again.
In recent years, NASA has planned to return to the Moon and then to go on to Mars and to colonize Mars, perhaps with people traveling there in Elon Musk's SpaceX "Starship." In Trump's Second Inaugural Address, he devoted a long passage to declaring America's "Manifest Destiny" to send Americans to Mars to establish a permanent colony. This would initiate the new era of human interplanetary migration.
But as I have said previously, I see no evidence that Trump and his people have thought about the really hard problems for human interplanetary migration. The deepest problem is that the universe wants to kill us. The universe is not hospitable to life--particularly, human intelligent life. We have not found life anywhere beyond the Earth. And even on the Earth, we know that the Earth has been lifeless for most of its history. The conditions in the Earth's biosphere for sustaining human life have arisen only for a few million years. Moreover, we have to foresee that sometime in the future, the Earth will once again become lifeless.
Once we leave the Earth's biosphere, the lack of a breathable atmosphere, food, water, and protection from deadly cosmic radiation make the extraterrestrial universe a constant threat to human life. No one knows how to create an artificial biosphere in deep space that would sustain human life for prolonged periods. Until we know how to do that, we have to assume that Trump's American Martians will not live for long. Most of them will probably die during their six-month trip to Mars.
1995. The Schengen Agreement takes effect. In the Schengen area, there is free movement between European countries (29 countries with a population of over 450 million) with no systematic border controls. This shows that an open borders policy can work, and it's a reminder of what the world was like before World War I--a world without passports.
2020. The COVID-19 pandemic restricts movement around the planet. When humans migrate, infectious microbes migrate with them, which can create devastating pandemics--such as those that killed millions of American Indigenous people who had no immunity to European infectious diseases.
2025. Ever since his first run for the Presidency in 2016, Donald Trump has promised that he would deport all illegal immigrants in the United States. The most recent estimates indicate that there are probably over 16 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today. By my rough calculation, if Trump is going to deport all of these people before the end of his term, that would require deporting 11,000 people every day. Hardly likely to happen. But Trump's immigration bureaucracy is trying hard. And it helps to have the Congress increasing ICE's budget by 37 billion dollars!
The ICE raids--with violent masked men detaining, punishing, and deporting people without due process of law--are teaching Americans something about immigration policy. Millions of people who have lived and worked in our communities for many years will be disappearing. Most of them have been good Americans. If you want to deport 16 million immigrant Americans, this is what will happen. Are you sure this is good for the country? Will this make America Great Again? Or will it make America worse when all those Americans are gone?
I foresee that most Americans will decide no, this is not what we want. And then we will have to consider an alternative immigration policy--perhaps even a policy of promoting increased immigration to reverse the harm from Trump's ICE raids. In particular, we should consider Abraham Lincoln's proposals for increasing immigration to America by fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence to offer liberty to all those human beings who long for it. That will be the subject for my next post.
REFERENCES
Arnold, Bettina. 1992. "The Past as Propaganda." Archaeology 45: 30-37.
Bergunder, Michael. 2004. "Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu Nationalist Reconstructions of Indian Prehistory." Historiographia Linguistica 31: 59-104.
Bryant, Edwin F., and Laurie L. Patton, eds. 2005. The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. London: Routledge.
Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.
Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration. New York: The Experiment.
Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America.
Poliakov, Leon. 1974. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.
Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.
Weikart, Richard. 2009. Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Witzel, Michael. 2019. "The Home of the Aryans." In Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese, and Razib Khan, eds., Which of Us Are Aryans? Rethinking the Concept of Our Origins. New Delhi, India: Aleph Book Company.
