Heimat and Home: Mobility Among Jews in Quincy, Illinois

Published studies of return migration are useful to provide general context for this work but are not directly applicable because they refer to a later time period or to different immigrant groups. [...]recently, the best estimates of return migration were based on US government statistics compiled in 1908 and 1923.26 Mark Wyman found high rates of return among immigrants of all religions arriving in America between 1908 and 1923: about a fifth of all the English, French, and German; two-fifths of all Poles; half of all Russians; and two-thirds of all Hungarians.27 Dirk Hoerder found that about fourteen percent of Europeans who emigrated between 1815 and 1939 returned, for a total of seven million out of about fifty million.28 In Wyman’s analysis, the lowest rate of return migration—five percent—is ascribed to “Hebrews.” For a variety of reasons explained in the Appendix, this likely undercounts those who died abroad. [...]the authors estimate that the rate of return migration was in the range of two to four percent.36 Table 2. Since other evidence suggests that non-Jews returned to Europe at rates significantly higher than Jews, Sarna’s co-mingling of Jewish and non-Jewish Russians inflates his estimates of the Jewish rate of return migration. Some of the travel occurred when the immigrants lived in the US but no longer in Quincy. 59. Since those from Western and Central Europe were more prosperous than those from Eastern Europe, it is not surprising that a larger share of them traveled abroad.