II 
THE CAUSES OF IMMIGRATION 
Escape from Religious or Political Persecution 
In our school histories all American children read 
that their forefathers in the colonial days fled from 
Europe to America to escape religious or political per 
secution. In later and more complete text-books men 
tion is likewise made of the fact that certain of the 
colonists were influenced by the motive of commercial 
advantages, and that still others, criminals or paupers, 
were shipped from their home country against their 
will for that country’s good. So much emphasis, how 
ever, has been laid upon the desire of our forefathers 
to escape from religious or political persecution, that 
in the minds of most Americans that influence remains 
as explaining the chief incentive for our early immi 
gration. 
So much sympathy was later aroused, especially 
during the revolutionary days of 1848 in Europe, for 
those who, struggling for a constitutional government 
in their home countries, failed and were obliged to 
emigrate, in order to escape political punishment, that 
this motive for immigration seems to most of us a 
force with greater influence than it, in fact, has 
exerted. It is probably the fact that, with the excep 
tion of the Pilgrim Fathers, possibly the Palatines, 
some of the Scotch-Irish in the early part of the 
eighteenth century, and here and there a relatively 
few political refugees, the great mass of immigrants 
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