Is Everywhere Nowhere?
Nomads, Nations, and
the Immigrant Paradigm
of United States History

Donna R. Gabaccia

Like the migrants they study, historians of migration step across national boundaries. Like migrants, too, they thus expose themselves to what Gérard Noiriel calls "the tyranny of the national."1 National historiography dominates our discipline. As students of transnational phenomena, however, historians of migration must master more than one national "field." They are simultaneously historians of the world, of several nations, and of the ethnic, religious, and regional loyalties that sustain—and sometimes motivate—migration.	1
Historians of migration view human movement as an ordinary, rather than exceptional, dimension of human life and as an almost universal human experience. Yet modern historiography makes migration a significant theme mainly when it constructs nations. The immigrant paradigm of American history provides a familiar example.2 This historical interpretation defines the United States as a nation of immigrants, in which incorporation of foreigners symbolizes the promise and accomplishments of American democracy. The paradigm transforms migrants, and their historians, into "nowhere men," occupying a historiographical nowhere land.	2
Certainly, the migrants I have studied from Italy and Sicily were mobile people for whom migration was more often a way of life than a moment of transition from one national identity to another. One early scholar of international migrations noted that the residents of Italy had been leaving home "since time immemorial." Migrations from what is now Italy attracted negative attention as early as the 1830s.3 They peaked in the years between 1890 and 1914, fell to nineteenth-century levels in the interwar years, and then grew to a mass movement again after World War II.	3
Most migrants who left Italy returned, although not from any love of their nation. Before 1861 there was no country of Italy; thereafter, observers noted, it was necessary to "make Italians." Modern Italian nationalism developed after unification, consolidating under fascism and the postwar Italian republic. Yet some scholars still deny Italy is a nation; others expect it to collapse.4 Until World War I, few migrants from Italy had strong national identities. They migrated through networks of kin and neighbors (paesani) from particular small towns; their strongest ties were to family and paesani. What surprises the modern student of these migrants is how effectively illiterate people with such particularist loyalties could communicate on a global scale, bridging continents.5	4
Migrants from Italy pioneered ways of life that scholars today call transnational because they link human experience in more than one nation. Yet migrants also came face to face with the increasing power of nation-states during their wide-ranging migrations. The persons who appear as "emigrants," "expatriates," and returners in one nation's statistics appear as immigrants in a dozen other nations—notably Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Tunisia.6 As they went about the mundane task of finding work, migrants responded to states' demands for passports, health inspections, taxes, military service, departure, naturalization, and loyalty. Many became "Italian" only when they left home; when they returned, neighbors called them "germanesi" or "americani."7 During the extended warfare of the twentieth century, however, sending and receiving countries alike expected greater loyalty from migrants, and national identities became a source of difference among former kin and neighbors.	. . .