As part of a large family history project I’m working on I’ve been reading a work copywritten in 1847 called “The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life,” by Edward Z.C. Judson, who worked under the pen name Ned Buntline. Buntline was in his time an extremely popular and prodigious writer. His Mysteries and Miseries was a five-part fictionalized account of a series of loosely connected criminal activities in New York City in the late 1840’s, a cross between The Godfather movies and any number of “true crime” television shows.
Buntline very deliberately and self-consciously strove to use his writings to influence the perceptions and enforcement of crime in New York City. Included in the Appendix to Mysteries and Miseries he included, in 1848, the following reflection on the causes of the increase in crime in New York City at the time. I think it is very illuminating for anyone following the present debate about our nation’s immigration policies.
To judge from the places of nativity of at least two thirds of the criminals, immigration must be one great cause [of the increase in crime in New York City from 1818 to 1848]. All of the large gang of burglars….are foreigners, mostly Englishmen. The denizens of the horrible circle known as the “Five Points” are principally Irishman and negroes; some few Dutch, are also living there, but not one American, to a hundred foreigners, can be found.
Our Alms Houses are occupied, at the ratio of about fifteen to one, by foreigners, the overflowings of the poor-houses in Europe. The street beggars are principally Irish, Germans, and Italians. When a real American beggar is found, he or she is the sauciest, most importunate and insolent of the whole crew – but we may thank our free systems of education, and, above all, our national pride and industry that they are scarce.
The immense numbers of emigrants which fill our hospitals and alms-houses, is an evil which bears very heavily upon the property-holders and tax-payers in this country, but there seems to be no remedy, although frequent complaints have caused legislative attention to the subject. We have plenty of room in this country for immigrants, if they would seek the unsettled parts; but it is to be regretted that most of the new comers either lack the means or the inclination to go to the interior, and thus become a burden to the inhabitants of the sea-port towns.
But to return to the causes of crime. It is not for the lack of laws that crime increases so rapidly, but we are obliged to believe that in a great measure it is owing to laxity in administrating the laws which have been enacted, and which are neglected by the officers whose duty it is to fulfil them.
I think it is important to reflect upon our history as a nation up until this time when we consider the enactment and enforcement of immigration laws today. This nation has always been exceptional in the number of immigrants that we can successfully accommodate, but the integrating of those immigrants into our existing societal structures has always been and will always be difficult and fraught with tensions and disagreements.
The extreme positions of either completely open borders or completely closed borders ignores our shared history and our great promise as a nation.