Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States ed. by Günter Bischof (review)

Immigration is a hot-button issue in both the United States and Europe today, but much of the popular rhetoric surrounding the subject lacks historical grounding. Consequently, it is important to have new scholarship examining the immigrant experience. The book Quiet Invaders Revisited is exactly that: a deep investigation of the lives of immigrants and the challenges they faced.

This text, an anthology of essays that grew out of a 2015 symposium and were edited by Günter Bischof, is part of a larger series on transatlantic connections, and this volume specifically focuses on the movement of people from Austria to the United States (with a brief mention of Canada). It is divided into three main parts: one on the overall history of this movement, the next on the period immediately after World War I, and the final chapter on the era of the Second World War. Despite all that has changed over those years, Bischof argues that the essays demonstrate some important continuities, in particular the difficulty of assimilation to American culture and the desire of many migrants to return to Austria. This is the central, unifying theme of the text—the idea that no matter how strong the push factors were for Austrian emigrants, there would always be some connection with the country of their birth. This contrasts with earlier scholarship on Austrian migrants, particularly the mid-twentieth-century work of American diplomat E. Wilder Spaulding, who suggested that (German-speaking) Austrians were pulled to the United States rather than pushed and that they quickly blended in with the native-born population. Spaulding's work was published in the midst of the Cold War, which is significant both because Austria was, at that point, a neutral country that embraced the myth that they were Hitler's first victims but also because the United States was conscious of its role as a superpower and, as such, wanted to show a strong, united front. Although 1968, the year his book was published, saw the expression of points of view that had previously been suppressed for the sake of unity, Spaulding's position is definitely one of consensus, one that requires immigrants to unquestioningly embrace the supposed American way of life. It is long past time to reject that position, and all of the authors in this volume have made important contributions to a more nuanced and realistic view of the immigrant experience.

One particularly fascinating essay is Andrea Strutz's piece "Austrian Immigration to Canada and Contributions of Austrian Migrants to Canadian Life in the Twentieth Century." Strutz begins with an explanation of the history of this migration up to the mid-twentieth century, and she claims that this subject is understudied and was only discovered by scholars in the 1990s, which is perhaps an oversimplification. There are many scholars who have studied migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Additionally, the story of Clifford Sifton, the minister of the interior who saw the value in migrants from Galicia, is one that every Canadian child learns in school and is very much part of the mythology of Canadian nation building today. What is more compelling about this essay are Strutz's case studies of later Austrian immigrants. This is original research that shows the challenges faced by migrants to Canada at a time when the country was just on the threshold of a major change in the way it viewed race and ethnicity. As Strutz notes, those in power in Canada before the mid-1960s viewed their country as a bastion of the British Empire. All of that changed after World War II and, in particular, in the 1960s, when Canada transformed into the multicultural state that we know today.

Several of the papers included in this text focus on Jewish Austrians and their experiences as migrants. This poses interesting questions of identity. Can one really compare the stories of Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants...