a) THE MAGNITUDE AND THE CAUSES

 "They were emigrants"

Quite a few years ago, in Milan, I witnessed a scene that left me with profound sadness.

As I walked through the station, I saw the vast waiting room, the side porticoes, and the adjacent piazza filled with three or four hundred poorly clad people, separated into different groups.  Their faces, bronzed by the sun and furrowed by the premature wrinkles of deprivation, reflected the inner turmoil convulsing their hearts at that moment.  There were old men bent with age and labor, young men in the prime of manhood, women pulling along or carrying their little ones, boys and girls, all drawn together by the same desire, all heading toward a common goal.

They were emigrants.  They had come from the various provinces

of Northern Italy and were waiting with trepidation for the train that would take them to the shores of the Mediterranean, whence the steamer would carry them to far-off America, where they hoped to find a less hostile fate, a land less unresponsive to their labors.     

These poor souls were leaving, some sent for by relatives who had preceded them on this voluntary exile; others, without knowing precisely where they were heading, pulled by that powerful instinct that impels birds to migrate.  They were going to America where ‑-  they had heard many times ‑- there was well paid employment for anyone with strong arms and good will.

With tears in their eyes, they had bid farewell to their native village, to which they were bound by so many tender memories.  But, without regret, they were preparing to leave their country which they had grown to know only through two despised realities: taxes and the military draft.  For a destitute person the place that gives him bread becomes his country.  Far, far away, these emigrants hoped to find bread, less scarce but no less hard-earned.

I left there deeply moved.  A flood of melancholy thoughts brought a lump to my throat.  Who can imagine ‑- I thought to myself ‑- the accumulated privations and misfortunes making such a painful decision seem so sweet to them!  How many disappointments does the future hold in store for them, how many new heartaches?  How many will succeed in the struggle for survival?  How many will succumb in the turmoil of the cities or the solitude of uninhabited plains?  Though securing food for the body, how many will be without food for the soul, which is no less necessary than the former, and will lose the faith of their forebears in a materialistic way of life?

Ever since that day, my thoughts have often turned to those unfortunate people.  That scene always reminds me of another one, no less desolate, unseen, but discernible in the letters of friends and the reports of travelers.  I picture the poor wretches landing in a strange land, among people who speak a language they do not understand, easy victims of inhuman exploitation.  I see them moistening with their sweat and tears an unyielding ground that exudes disease-bearing miasmas.  I see them, broken by labor, consumed with fever, sighing in vain for the skies of their distant motherland and the age-old poverty of their family home, finally dying without the consolation of their dear ones, without the word of faith to point out to them the reward God has promised to the good and the forlorn.  And those who win out in the cruel struggle for survival?  Alas!  Isolated, as they are, they

forget all supernatural notions, all precepts of Christian morality.  Day by day, they lose all sense of piety since it is not nourished by pious practices.  Instead, they allow brute instincts to replace more noble aspirations.

Faced with this lamentable situation, I have often asked myself: how can it be remedied?  Every time I happen to see in the papers some government circular warning the authorities and the public against certain speculators who carry out veritable raids of white slaves, sending them ‑- unsuspecting instruments of greed ‑- far away from their country toward a mirage of large and easy profits, and whenever from letters of friends or travelers' accounts I read that Italians are the pariahs among emigrants, that they do the meanest kinds of work ‑- as if there could be meanness in work ‑- that our own countrymen are the most abandoned and hence the least respected, that thousands upon thousands of our brothers and sisters live without the protection of their distant motherland, without the comfort of a friendly word, as objects of exploitation often unpunished, then I confess that I, too, blush with shame.  I feel humiliated as a priest and as an Italian, and I ask myself again: what can be done for them?

Just a few days ago a distinguished young traveler brought me greetings from several families from the mountains of Piacenza, now living in camps on the banks of the Orinoco River: "Tell our Bishop that we always remember his advice.  Tell him to pray for us and to send us a priest because here we live and die like animals...."  That message from my far-off children sounded like a rebuke.¹

"One of the most important facts in the history of modern Italy"

One of the most important facts in the history of modern Italy is the emigration of its people: important for the number of people who are affected, for the social problems it gives rise to, and for the economic evils of which it is a symptom. 

According to statistical data, Italian emigrants living in the American Republics total over 2 million: more than 1 million in the Republics of the South, of which more than 400 thousand in Brazil alone, the rest in the vast regions of the Americas, especially in the North.  New York City alone has 85,000.  During the decade 1880‑1890, 2 million people left Italy: 1 million temporary emigrants ‑-  a veritable ebb and

flow of human beings that provides the European labor market with our intelligent and hard working manpower and brings honor and money back to Italy ‑- and 1 million permanent emigrants, namely, people who cross the ocean in the mostly vain hope of returning, spreading throughout the young American republics, in the North and the South, in the largely populated cities, in the deserted "pampas" and unexplored forests, bringing everywhere their appreciated and esteemed activity (...).

These figures speak for themselves.  They state clearly and eloquently that, during the two-year period 1887‑1888, more people left Italy than from France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Switzerland put together; that our emigration is four times higher than Russia's; three times higher than that of Germany, which also has a very substantial emigration of its own; superior by a few thousand to that of the United Kingdom, which has very flourishing colonies and commercial interests throughout the world.²

"A phenomenon that has all the characteristics of a permanent fact"

The figures are shocking.  However, gentlemen, it seems that the phenomenon of emigration has not yet reached its peak because, despite the stringent conditions laid down in the law enacted two years ago to restrain the activity of emigration agents; despite the disillusionments and cries of sorrow that, now and then, reach us from across the ocean, to our anger and shame; finally, notwithstanding the Government's prohibitions, the sad exodus is still going on.  Gentlemen, the fact is that Italian emigration has increased and is still increasing because of our country's poor conditions, especially agricultural, and that it has been stimulated and is still being stimulated beyond all proportions by emigration agents and by the need for manpower resulting from the emancipation of the slaves in Brazil.  It does, however, fulfill a real need of the Italian people and is commensurate with the annual population increase.  So we are not dealing with a temporary phenomenon but with one that has all the characteristics of a permanent fact.  Italy is a nation with the largest annual population increase.  It increases at a rate of 11‑12 per thousand and is surpassed only by Holland which has a 13-per-thousand population increase of births over deaths. 

This is why, despite mass emigration, the population of Italy is increasing and why, in a few years, its beautiful cities and towns will reach their maximum density. 

According to reliable projections, if the population increases as fast as during the past twenty years, in a century there will be 100 million Italians.  Even allowing for the possibility that, through internal migration, Italy could accommodate another 10 million people within its national boundaries and thus reach a population of 40 or 50 million (which is how many Italy could feed if all the Regions had the same population density as Lombardy), there will still be another 50 million people who will spread around the world in the coming century, driven by an irresistible force, namely, the struggle for survival: 50 million people, gentlemen, scattered around the world like leaves driven by a gale!³

"Emigration is a natural fact and an inescapable necessity"

Emigration is a natural and providential phenomenon.  It is a safety valve given by God to our troubled society.  It is a saving force that is far more powerful than all the moral and material restraints devised by legislators to ensure public order and to safeguard the life and property of its citizens.  We all know the proverb: Mala suadens fames (hunger leads to crime).  Who could hold in line a nation convulsed by the pangs of hunger, with no hope of finding its daily bread elsewhere? 

For people who see the suffering caused by emigration and blithely ask: "Why are so many people leaving?" there is a very simple answer.  In most cases, emigration is not a pleasure but an inescapable necessity.  Of course, among the emigrants there are some bad individuals, who are vagrant or depraved; but they are a minority.  The vast majority, not to say all, of those who emigrate to far-off America do not fit that description.  They are not fleeing from Italy because they don't like work but because there isn't any.  They just don't know how they and their families can make ends meet.

One day a wonderful man, an exemplary Christian, from a little mountain village where I was making my pastoral visitation, came to see me and to ask for my blessing and a memento for himself and his family on the eve of their departure for America.  When I demurred, he countered with this simple but distressing dilemma: "Either you

steal or you emigrate.  I am not allowed to steal nor do I want to, because God and the law forbid it.  But in this place there is no way I can earn a living for me and my children.  So what can I do?  I have to emigrate: it's the only thing left. . . ."  I didn't know what to answer.  With a full heart, I blessed him and entrusted him to the protection of God.  But once more I became convinced that emigration is a necessity, a heroic and ultimate cure one has to accept, just as a sick person accepts painful surgery to avoid death.

Religion and emigration ‑- these are the only two means for saving society from a great catastrophe in the future: one by channeling surplus population toward other continents, the other by soothing with comforting hopes the desperate sorrow of those poor people.⁴