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Hungarian Immigrants in North America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

John Kosa
John Kosa*
Affiliation:
Le Moyne College
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Extract

Sociologists have formulated a number of general theories to explain the residential mobility of immigrants in American cities and the formation of immigrant colonies. One such theory, brought forth by the Chicago school of sociology, conceived the residential mobility of immigrant groups in reference to subsequent waves of immigration. According to that theory, an immigrant group, upon first arriving in a city, tends to settle in a compact community near the centre of the city which is usually a deteriorated area, a slum. As the individual immigrants improve their economic position, they move from this settlement to more desirable neighbourhoods; their place in the old colony, however, is taken by new immigrants. In such a process the older ethnic group may invade a new area near the centre of the city or it may move out entirely from that part of the city to be succeeded there by another ethnic group. This wave theory was successfully applied to Canadian cities to explain the foreign islands of Montreal and the Jewish community of Winnipeg.

Recently Walter Firey has put forth another theory that regards the foreign colonies as more static formations in the ecology of large cities. His study of the Italian settlement in the North End of Boston has showed that Italian immigrants localize social solidarity in their ethnic area. They gather in a section of the city where they are among themselves and may maintain rather undisturbed their special type of life with its old system of values. Thus, the theory of localized social solidarity would imply that ethnic groups show less residential mobility than the native-born population and do not fall in line with the constant “filtering process” whereby the average resident tends to filter, according to his socio-economic success, into better residential districts with higher rents.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , August 1956 , pp. 358 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1956

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the Canadian Social Science Research Council and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, Ottawa, for financial assistance in carrying out the research.

References

1 Park, R. E. and Burgess, E. W., The City (Chicago, 1925)Google Scholar; Zorbaugh, H. W., The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar; Cressey, Paul F., “The Succession of Cultural Groups,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1930.Google Scholar

2 Eva R. Younge, “Population Movements and the Assimilation of Alien Groups in Canada,” this Journal, X, no. 3, Aug., 1944, 372–80; Rosenberg, Louis, The Jewish Community of Winnipeg (Montreal, 1946), 21–6.Google Scholar

3 Firey, Walter, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge, Mass., 1947)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. v.

4 Firestone, O. J., Residential Real Estate in Canada (Toronto, 1951)Google Scholar; Hoyt, Homer, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, D.C.: Federal Housing Administration, 1939).Google Scholar

5 Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Origin, Birthplace, Nationality and Language of the Canadian People (census study) (Ottawa, 1929), 107 Google Scholar; Hurd, W. Burton, “Racial Origins and Nativity of the Canadian People,” Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, XIII, Monographs (Ottawa, 1942), 625 seq.Google Scholar

6 Ruzsa, Jenö, A kanadai magyarság története (A History of the Hungarians in Canada) (Toronto, 1940), 285, 156.Google Scholar

7 W. B. Hurd and J. C. Cameron, “Population Movements in Canada, 1921–31,” this Journal, I, no. 2, May, 1935, 223; Cudmore, S. A. and Caldwell, H. G., “Rural and Urban Composition of the Canadian Population,” Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, XIII, 470–2.Google Scholar

8 It seems that depression generally increased the attraction of low-rent ethnic colonies. For example, of the four Hungarian colonies in Chicago, the two with low median monthly rentals increased their Hungarian population from 1930 to 1940; the colony with the highest rentals decreased sharply.

9 It appears that all married Hungarian immigrants in Canada acquired some piece of real estate. In the sample of 112 men in Ontario, all the married men were property owners, and only 17 members of the group, all single, had no property.

10 Such a selection was, at least partly, motivated by the ecology of many continental cities (including Budapest) where the well-to-do people preferred apartments near to the centre of the city.

11 This area is to be found in census tract no. 55 of Toronto. Since the census does not enumerate the Hungarian group separately, the estimate of our informants could not be checked.

12 In the sample of 112 Hungarian men in Ontario, one out of every ten had an estimated wealth of more than $100 thousand, one out of every three more than $35 thousand.

13 Concerning Burlington, Vt., see Anderson, Elin L., We Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), 42–3, 45–8, 160.Google Scholar

14 Riis, Jacob A., How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1890).Google Scholar

15 This area was, at that time, already known to the Hungarians. The first Hungarian club, founded in the 1860's for the gentlemen exiles of the revolution of 1848, had had its premises in the Bowery.

16 Those few persons who were admitted in the following years on the basis of the Hungarian immigration quota came, as a rule, from higher classes and did not move into an ethnic community.

17 The Hungarian island on the Near North Side, Chicago (present census tracts nos. 105, 115, 116, and 119) shows similarly a continuous settlement of almost seventy years.

18 Tract no. 138 had the highest population of Hungarian birth of all the census tracts of the city, that is, 831 persons, or 6.6 per cent of the population of the census tract.

19 Similarly, the Hungarian island on the South Side, Chicago (present census tracts no. 657 and 673) shows a continuous settlement of more than fifty years.

20 Hungarian restaurants in Yorkville, together with similar Austrian, Czech, and German ones, are usually listed in the tourist guides that recommend eating places in New York.

21 Concerning the Hungarians in New York, see: Deri, Emerich, New York Times Magazine Section, 10 24, 1926 Google Scholar, quoted by Anderson, N. and Lindeman, E. C. in Urban Sociology (New York, 1928), 81–3Google Scholar; Irwin, Will, Highlights of Manhattan (New York, 1927), 301–4Google Scholar; Koos, Earl Lomon, Families in Trouble (New York, 1946)Google Scholar; Grebler, Leo, Housing Market Behaviour in a Declining Area (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

22 See Cook, H. F., The Magyars of Cleveland (Cleveland: Citizen's Bureau, 1919).Google Scholar See also the excellent studies of Beynon, Erdmann D.: “Occupational Adjustment of Hungarian Immigrants in an American Urban Community,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1933 Google Scholar; “Social Mobility and Social Distance among Hungarian Immigrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology, XLI, 01, 1936 Google Scholar; and “The Hungarians of Michigan,” Michigan History Magazine, XXI, 1937.Google Scholar

23 Orth, Samuel P., Our Foreigners (New Haven, Conn., 1920)Google Scholar; Walker, Charles R., Steeltown (New York, 1950).Google Scholar

24 Marchbin, Andrew A., “A Critical History of the Origin and Migration of the Gypsies,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1939.Google Scholar

25 Lengyel, Emil, Americans from Hungary (Philadelphia and New York, 1948), 142 ff.Google Scholar

26 Balogh, Joseph K., “An Analysis of Cultural Organizations of Hungarian-Americans in Pittsburgh and Alleghany County,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1945, 15.Google Scholar