THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY^321tor. But it had one serious disadvantage: it selected underemployed
peasants of little skill and education, whose potential contribution to
the economy was limited, even if they stayed.
The numbers alone, moreover, do not tell the whole story. Few Eu
ropeans who stayed became citizens—between 1850 and 1930, under
5 percent of immigrants took Argentine nationality because, among
other reasons, as citizens they would have been liable for military ser
vice.* This was a land that needed people but, compared to the United
States, found it hard to win and hold them. That was no doubt due in
part to want of economic opportunity. But loyalty needs cultivation,
and indifference is a weakness of accidental sovereignties. What do
they stand for, and who stands for them?^20
In contrast, immigration picked up early in the United States, rising
from 14.3 thousand per year in the 1820s to 259.8 thousand in the
1850s. With the triumph of steam navigation and the opening of the
West, immigration went from 281,000 per year in the 1870s, 524.7 in
the 1880s, back to 368.8 thousand in the 1890s, to a peak of 879.5
thousand in the 1900s, when a number of years saw more than 1 mil
lion newcomers enter, t In all, some 32 million people entered the
United States from 1821 to 1914, when American population went
from 10 to 94 million—not so large a share of the increase as in Ar
gentina, but far more important in aggregate.^21
The character of the immigration also was significantly different.
Most newcomers to the United States came from the British Isles and
northwestern Europe, with southern and eastern Europe picking up to
ward the end of the nineteenth century. More of them were literate;
many were trained craftsmen (classified as "skilled"); until the 1840s,
more of them were farmers than laborers.^22 The immigrants were drawn
by the prospect of cheap homesteads and high wages, and few of them
went to the slave South. By comparison with Latin America, these new
comers brought with them greater knowledge and skills. The immi
grants to Argentina would have to catch up later.** (They never did.)
- The earlier period saw negligible naturalization: in 1895, only 0.16 percent; in
1914, 1.4 percent—Cornblit, "European Immigrants," p. 232, Table 11.
t Immigration was much influenced by conditions in the States and in Europe, not
only by business conjuncture but by war and revolution. Thus the failure of revolutions
in 1830 and 1848 promoted emigration; the American Civil War discouraged it.
** Some readers may find such a comparison jarring (politically incorrect). It is, how
ever, no more than fact; and no different in concept from the efforts of economists to
weight labor inputs to productivity growth by years of schooling and other additions
to human capital.