c) THE CONSEQUENCES

"How bitter is the bread of the emigrant"

The dangers connected with this type of emigration are numberless, and so are the evils connected with it. 

Ten years ago, when I gave heed to the cry of distress of our poor emigrants and wrote a pamphlet that had a profound echo in the hearts of all people of good will, galvanizing the thoughts and activities of people of all classes, I had no idea of the untold evils and dangers our poor emigrants are confronted with.  Everything, gentlemen, everything works against the emigrant!  His troubles often begin before he leaves his poor home, in the person of an emigration agent who, with promises of easy riches, convinces him to emigrate and then sends him wherever it serves the agent's interests and not where it is best for the emigrant.  Along the journey, which often turns into tragedy, the emigrant is shadowed by these very same evils.  Then, upon his arrival in disease-infested areas, he finds these evils in the jobs for which he often is not fit, under bosses made inhuman either by an insatiable greed for money or by the habit of regarding workers as inferior beings.  These evils multiply a thousand times when evil-minded people try to ensnare the emigrants in foreign countries where they are unfamiliar with language and customs and are condemned to a state of isolation that is often the death of body and soul. 

I could cite many instances showing how wet with tears and bitter

to the taste was the bread of the emigrants, of those unfortunate souls, who attracted either by vain hopes or false promises, found an Iliad of woes, abandonment, hunger, and not rarely death where they had believed they would find a paradise.  They had dreamed of an Eldorado, made attractive by a mirage born of need, not realizing that in an instant simoun, the violent wind of reality, scatters the enchanted cities of their dreams!  Wretched souls!  Exhausted by work, the climate, and the insects, they fall heartbroken to the soil made fertile by their labors, on the edge of the green forests they have cleared neither for themselves nor for their children, racked by the gentle and fatal sickness of nostalgia, dreaming perhaps of the homeland which had not even been able to feed them, calling in vain for the minister of their forefathers' holy religion to soothe the terrors of the last agony with the immortal hopes of the faith.

Gentlemen, it is not a happy picture, but this is the true story of thousands and thousands of our fellow countrymen who have emigrated.  I have put it together from the reports of my Missionaries and from what has been told or written to me by those who have witnessed and shared these most distressing facts.

However, I do not want to be misunderstood or appear pessimistic.  The sad happenings I have mentioned are not true of all emigrants.  Very many of them have found in the countries hosting them an adequate living, many a comfortable one, and some even wealth.  They form communities of which the motherland can be proud.  But there are also very many who are miserable, and in great measure this is due to their ignorance and to our neglect.⁸

"An infinity of material and moral evils"

The dangers the emigrants must face are such and so many that not even a perspicacious person could avoid them completely.  What shall we say of the poor peasants who trust themselves to people who in every emigrant see an object to be exploited? 

Unfortunately, newspaper readers may recall a number of incidents, sometimes shameful, sometimes tragic, but always heartbreaking, which have victimized our poor brothers and sisters.

A few years ago, the newspapers reported that two or three hundred

emigrants who had arrived at the port of embarkation ‑- I can't remember whether Genoa or Naples ‑- found out that the money they had saved by much hard work and the sale of their remaining belongings had ended up in the hands of swindlers.  You can imagine the tears, the outcries, the cursing and, finally, the return to their hometown at public expense.

In early 1873, a steamship loaded with many families from the Abruzzi Region arrived in New York.  The emigration agents had put them aboard the boat with the promise that they would sail for Buenos Aires where relatives and friends were anxiously waiting for them.  But those poor wretches, who had already suffered so much during the crossing, found themselves on other shores, exhausted, far away from their intended destination and without money to continue their journey.

However, these might be exceptions.  But the general rule is the manner in which our emigrants are transported.  Crammed worse than beasts, they are stowed on ships in much greater numbers than the regulations or the capacity of the vessels allow.  They make the long uncomfortable voyage literally huddled together, with what risks for their health and morality one can easily imagine.

What can we say about the even more distressing situation that awaits them on their arrival at their longed-for destination?  They are often taken in by clever tricks, dazzled by a thousand false promises, and forced by necessity to bind themselves to contracts that are a veritable form of slavery, their children left begging on the path to crime and the women cast into the abyss of dishonor.

The vast uncultivated lands in South America are leased out to the emigrants either directly by the Governments or by private organizations that have acquired the land for speculation.  After a certain number of years and upon payment of appropriate fees, the peasants become owners of the land they have drenched with their sweat.  The settlers pitch their tents in these regions and transform them into productive and prosperous farms.  These peasants often come from the same area, sometimes from the same village, and name after their home town the new settlement where Divine Providence has led them. 

But while these settlements can lessen the dangers of emigration and make life safer and less oppressive, they can also, if not well overseen, cause countless material and moral evils.  In fact, our poor peasants run the risk of being hoodwinked by exploiters into spending

their whole life on sterile lands and in unwholesome places, exposed to wild animals and fierce tribes.  All these things have already happened, and more than once.  The press and public opinion have repeatedly raised a hue and cry over these conditions.⁹

"Very easy prey to exploiters"

Where is this great mass of people, this flood of Italian blood going? 

Most of them, sad to say, don't know where they are going.  For them it's America, the country where those who leave the motherland in search of fortune go.  South America or North America, in temperate or tropical zones, in healthy or pernicious climates, on fertile lands or on lands even more sterile than those they have abandoned, in populated centers or in deserted areas: they don't know.  They go to America, often with the added burden of a signed blank contract that places, if not their person, surely their work at the service of a boss. 

In this way, emigration agents sent a rather large number of emigrants to Brazil to take the place of the already insufficient number of workers needed for agriculture, a number, as I mentioned before, that had become absolutely inadequate because of the abolition of slavery.  In this way, too, the padrone system, condemned by a bill of the United States Senate, massed together an immense number of emigrants in New York City ‑- attracted there by a thousand promises ‑- poor emigrants who were shamelessly exploited and then abandoned to make room for the new arrivals, the new victims of sordid gains. 

In Chile, finally, not to mention many other cases, several thousand countrymen of ours, lured there by ridiculous lies, now find neglect and destitution.  While here in the motherland ignorance and poverty make them easy victims of the emigration agents, down there isolation and destitution make them very easy prey to exploiters, who are always and everywhere without an ounce of compassion, there more so than elsewhere.  Thus, instead of appropriate and well paid work, of abundant and healthy nourishment, those unfortunates find a backbreaking job ‑- if and when they do ‑- and a remuneration that is a real mockery compared to the work, the danger, and the rising cost of the necessities of life.  Finally they discover that the little improvement in food supplies is often paid for at the high price of the privation of

meaningful social life.¹⁰

"They lose the sense of their identity and faith"

However, who could describe the dangers our poor emigrants meet when it comes to their religious life.  Suffice it to say that the vast majority lives there without ever seeing the face of a priest or the cross on a bell tower.  So, abandoned to themselves, either they give in to the most disheartening indifference or they desert the faith of their forefathers and mothers.  Gentlemen, I will tell you something that cuts me to the quick when I think of it.  In sixty years, according to official calculations, 40 million Catholics emigrated to a great American Republic.  Now, even supposing that 20 million returned ‑- which actually has never happened ‑- Catholics living there should number at least 20 million, taking into account births and deaths.  But, according to the last ecclesiastical census, the number of Catholics does not reach, or certainly at that time it did not reach, 8 million.  Where did the other 12 million go? 

They lose the sense of their identity and with that ‑- the thought breaks my heart ‑- their attachment to the Catholic Faith.  They fall prey to Protestant propaganda, unfortunate victims of the sects, more active and numerous there than in other places.  Gentlemen, allow a Bishop to weep before you over such a misfortune!  The lack of the spiritual bread that is the word of God, the impossibility of reconciliation with him, the absence of the liturgy and of any encouragement to do good, exercise a deadly influence on the morale of the people.  An educated person also is subjected to such a danger, but to a lesser degree because his education, culture, and theoretical knowledge of religion somehow help to safeguard him from the frost of indifference.  If nothing else, he can unite himself spiritually with the divine mysteries celebrated elsewhere and nourish his mind with wholesome reading.  But how could a poor peasant rise to such sublime thoughts?  To him, more than to others, the idea of religion is inseparable from that of Church and priest.  Where every visual religious display is silent, little by little he forgets his duties toward God; and Christian life weakens and dies in his heart.  The thirst for truth, the desire of the infinite,

however, do not die in him!  "Man," says a modern unbelieving philosopher, "needs religion and is religious by nature, just as he is intelligent by nature.  Better yet, he is religious because he is endowed with reason."  The more it becomes impossible to satisfy this need, the more it makes itself felt.  This is evident among our migrants, even where the most despicable materialism reigns supreme for lack of priests.  So imagine how much that need must be alive among those ‑- and they are the majority ‑- who still sense  the dignity of their own person and feel the claims of their own conscience.¹¹

"They are abandoned down there without a shadow of religious care"

When they don't die during the voyage or succumb to privation or to heartbreak for having been duped, these poor migrant peasants are left in those regions without a shadow of religious assistance.  Their state is more easily imagined than described.

There are not many priests in America.  The few who are available almost always do not know our language and could not be of any help, much as they might want to, for the simple reason that our emigrants would not understand them.  Besides, the emigrants are so spread out all over that vast territory that the priest could visit them only rarely and briefly.

Hence, Italians in America are almost constrained, as a rule, to live a life that is worse than pagan, without Mass, without sacraments, without public devotions, without liturgy, and without the word of God, so that it is already a lot if their children are baptized.  It is clear that such a state of affairs must imperceptibly lead those poor wretches to a frightening indifference toward religion and a dehumanizing materialism (...).

Moreover, we must not forget that, though there are not all that many Catholic churches and priests in America, there is plenty of Protestant and Masonic proselytizing, depending on places. 

Where the voice of God's minister does not arrive, immoral novels, pamphlets, books and flyers from various sects do arrive.  Hence, whereas religious assistance is totally lacking, the dangers to the faith of our poor emigrants abound.  Either out of expediency or out of ignorance, the emigrants let themselves get caught in the nets of the

apostles of error.¹²

"Most of the evils could be avoided"

What most saddens the heart is the thought that most of the religious, moral, and economic ills to which our emigration is exposed could be avoided or much reduced if the ruling classes of Italy were conscious of the duties that bind them to their expatriate brethren.  In fact, gentlemen, the immense American countries are not so unhealthy as not to be able to offer a tranquil corner to our emigration.  Not all lands are so controlled by speculation that some fertile lands could not be found at a good price, such as to assure a fair profit to the workers.  It is all a question of pointing this out to our emigrants.  But when was this ever done in Italy?  Was the emigrant ever told that he should be on his guard against the various contracts and lands offered him and against the traps concealed in them?  For example, are the lands unsafe, unhealthy, unproductive?  Though fertile, are they so far away from any possible means of communication, so isolated from all human contact as to cause the produce of the emigrant's labor to remain unsold, leaving him rich and poor at the same time?

I repeat, when was this ever done in Italy?  At most, some people do a little shouting, while others weep under the blows of events that offend national pride in the person of those brothers and sisters of ours.  There are cries and expressions of compassion, even demands for some government measures.  Then what?  All is hushed up, all is forgotten, all calms down in the deceiving quiet of the wave that hides its victim and waits for new ones.¹³