American Passage by Vincent J. Cannato Read Free Book Online Page A

Greenwich, Washington, and Cedar Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, according to one eyewitness, was home to “one hundred and thirty-nine immigrant runners, drinking at boarding houses for immigrants, prostitutes, rummies, watch stuffers, thimble riggers and pocketbook droppers.” There was money to be made in selling railroad tickets at inflated prices, charging exorbitant rates for rooms at boardinghouses, overcharging immigrants for their baggage by playing with the scales, or even outright thievery and extortion. Confusion was the ally of the runner and the enemy of the immigrant.
    As soon as a ship docked, runners would board it. If the immigrants were from Germany, the runners would speak German; Irish immigrants would encounter runners who hailed from the old sod. If immigrants were not immediately taken in by these entreaties, runners would forcibly take their luggage to a nearby boardinghouse for “safe-keeping.” When immigrants tried to claim their baggage, they were often induced to stay at the boardinghouse with the promise of cheap lodging and meals. When their stay had ended and it was time to move on, these greenhorns would be handed an excessive bill for their room and food and the storage of their luggage. If they could not pay the inflated bill, lodging house owners would keep the baggage as collateral. It was a prosperous racket, and much of the money made in fleecing immigrants went up the chain to Rynders, who was able to run his operations with little interference from city officials. They were all making a good living from immigration, and now Castle Garden was in danger of putting them out of business.
    A committee of the New York State Assembly investigated the situation in the mid-1840s. It had heard the rumors and read the newspaper reports about how runners preyed on immigrants, but the committee confessed that it could not “have believed the extent to which these frauds and outrages have been practiced” until it began to investigate them.
    The federal government was largely uninterested in immigration. Occasionally, Congress would be prodded into action to address the overcrowding that afflicted immigrants traveling across the Atlantic in steerage, but it did little in the way of regulating the flow of immigrants. Despite an undertone of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, the growing nation welcomed European immigrants to help settle the country. In the 1840s, President John Tyler lauded “emigrants from all parts of the civilized world, who come among us to partake of the blessings of our free institutions and to aid by their labor to swell the current of our wealth and power.” However, the slaveholding Tyler made clear that his message was for white Europeans only.
    The job of regulating immigration was left to states like Massachusetts and New York, which passed laws continuing colonial policies restricting the immigration of criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases. States charged ship owners a head tax for each immigrant to pay for the care of poor and sick immigrants and required the posting of a bond for those immigrants deemed likely to become public charges. Although state laws would foreshadow the future of federal immigration regulation, they were weakly enforced, and few immigrants were excluded.
    It would be up to private individuals and organizations to protect immigrants from abuse. Ethnic solidarity prompted the creation of immigrant aid societies. New York’s Irish already had some success in this endeavor, forming the Irish Emigrant Society in 1841 to “afford advice, information, aid and protection, to emigrants from Ireland, and generally to promote their welfare.” In 1847, it teamed up with the German Society and lobbied New York State to create the Board of Commissioners of Emigration, which consisted of the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, the heads of the German and Irish Emigrant Societies, and six others appointed by the