The United States is officially no longer a nation of immigrants.
The federal Citizenship and Immigration Services is changing its mission statement, eliminating that passage that historically described the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”
This, of course, is part of the Trump administration’s policies to not just crack down on illegal immigration but to try to reduce legal immigration, as well. This comes despite warnings from many economists and demographers that we actually need more immigration to replenish a labor pool that will soon shrink with the retirement of the baby boomers.
We’ve explored that before, though, so today let’s do something different. Let’s look at Virginia’s immigration history — and how that history relates to today. In the South, we tend to think of immigration as historically being a Northern phenomenon — that’s where Ellis Island is. Demography in the South seemed simpler — a matter of black and white. Except Virginia’s immigration history is a lot more complicated than we tend to remember. We think of the early settlement of Virginia being an English enterprise — and politically, it was. Jamestown, though, was only purely English for its first year or so. In either 1608 or 1609 (accounts vary), the colony imported Polish artisans — glassblowers, carpenters, makers of pitch and tar, all trades that the new colony needed. This would represent the earliest example of what today we’d call skills-based immigration.
Today, when we think of Polish-Americans, we think of, say, Chicago. But we really need to think back to Jamestown. These Polish colonists were not treated equally, though. When the first elections for the House of Burgesses were held in 1619, the Poles were not allowed to vote. Their response? They went on strike — the first recorded strike in North America. (Somehow, this bit of history never made it into Virginia history textbooks in school.)
Colonial leaders faced a crisis. They needed the goods these workers produced. They also needed more colonists, and didn’t want to appear to discourage newcomers, no matter what their ethnicity. The colonial governor relented, and granted Polish workers the right to vote. In time, there were even bilingual schools in Virginia, teaching both English and Polish. In time, the Polish community faded away — absorbed into what today we’d call the melting pot. Still, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York the Polish exhibit included a painting called “Poles in Jamestown.”
The same year that the Polish workers in Jamestown went on strike marked the beginning of non-consensual immigration: The first Africans arrived, originally captives on a Portuguese slave ship that eventually found its way into English hands.
The great valley west of the Blue Ridge was first colonized by two different waves of immigration — Germans and Scots-Irish, whose influence we still see and hear today in place names from Hershberger Road to Fort Lewis. Although the big influx of German immigrants was in the early 1700s, the German language persisted in parts of Shenandoah Valley for nearly two centuries. As late as 1938, a Dayton printer produced a hymnal in German for the Old Order Mennonites who still clung to their forefathers’ tongue.
Popular imagination tends to freeze immigration in the South as a colonial phenomenon, but that’s a misreading of history. It’s true that mass immigration in 1800s and early 1900s mostly swept across the North and Midwest — that’s where the industrial age was being born with its demand for more workers, while the South was still largely locked in an agricultural past.
It’s not that Virginia didn’t try, though. In 1866, the General Assembly was faced with the monumental task of rebuilding the state’s war-ravaged economy. One response was to create the Virginia Land and Aid Immigration Company to encourage newcomers — be they other Americans or foreigners. John Imboden, a Staunton lawyer and former Confederate general, was named “immigration agent.” The effort was not particularly successful, though, but still the state tried.
What really drove immigration was a changing economy. Soon after Big Lick turned into a railroad boomtown in the 1880s, the new city of Roanoke saw immigrants from Greece and Lebanon — whose heritage is still celebrated today in the annual Lebanese Festival at St. Elias Maronite Catholic Church each June and the annual Greek Festival at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church each September.
Today, Appalachia is often portrayed as the homogenous bastion of the descendants of Scots-Irish pioneers, yet that’s not true at all. When coal mines were first being developed, Appalachia drew immigrants from across eastern and southern Europe.
We forget our own history. The Statue of Liberty was erected in New York harbor in 1886. If there were a sister statue, though, it might well have been put up in Roanoke, then a gateway to the coalfields.
The town of Pocahontas in Tazewell County had a particularly large Hungarian population, which gave rise to an annual cabbage roll dinner at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church — a tradition that continued until 2008 (and might be revived this year). Contemporary accounts in the early 1900s refer to a large “Italian colony” in the Stonega community of Wise County. Next door, one survey found that 49.5 percent of the coal miners in Harrison and Marion counties in West Virginia were immigrants, with the greatest number from Italy. There’s still an annual West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival in Clarksburg.
If Appalachia voters today stand against immigration, that is a departure from their own history. It’s also worth remembering that “legal immigration” in those days often simply meant getting off the boat; there were no green cards then. It wasn’t until the western states saw lots of Chinese immigration in the 1880s that the federal government started restricting who could immigrate.
Today, Virginia’s immigrants come mostly from Asia and Latin America and are concentrated in Northern Virginia; 68 percent of the state’s foreign-born population lives there; only 1.6 percent of them in Roanoke. Framed another way, immigrants comprise nearly one-fourth of Northern Virginia’s population. In Roanoke, immigrants constitute 4.7 percent of the population; in Blacksburg, 6.2 percent.