(^320) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
about granted indemnity to squatters, which only encouraged the prac
tice; and then in 1841 a general "pre-emption" law made squatting
legal and gave the occupant the right to buy his holding at the mini
mum price.^16
A big exception was made to encourage railway construction. New
lines were granted land along the right-of-way, and these in turn
sought generally to sell them to independent farmers. These were pre
ferred, not because they were more lovable, but because they generated
more freight than ranchers. In the last analysis, nature had its say: as
one went west and rainfall diminished, more of the land went in large
tracts for livestock and herding. Meanwhile towns became cities, and
cities flourished, not only as markets and shipping points, but also as
centers of manufacture. A good example: Cincinnati, largest city of
the pre-Civil War West, center of meat processing and rendering
("Porkopolis"), pole of attraction for German immigrants, city of small
factories making, among other things, jewelry, stoves, and musical in
struments.^17
These differences in policy and culture are reflected in the immigra
tion figures. In Argentina, immigration did not pick up until the last
quarter of the century, when wheat cultivation took off—about half a
million hectares under cultivation in the early 1870s, still only 1.3 mil
lion in the early 1890s, and then, explosion, some 24 million on the
eve of World War I.^18 One of the leading historians of Argentina writes
of immigrants arriving "in enormous droves"—some 5.9 million be
tween 1871 and 1914, of whom 3.1 million stayed, in a country of 1.7
million in 1869 (not counting Indians) and 7.8 million in 1914.^19 The
flow was not even, reflecting political events, business conditions, and
population pressure in the country of origin. In the 1870s, net immi
gration averaged 28.6 thousand per year; in the eighties it tripled, to
86.5 thousand. After that the flow diminished, to 40.6 thousand in the
nineties; and then in the new century, especially from 1904 to 1913,
it tripled again, to 125.9 thousand.
To be sure, the net figures understate the immigrant contribution to
labor supply. Many of these migrants were seasonal agricultural work
ers, the so-calledgolondrinas (swallows), recruited largely in southern
Italy, travel paid from Buenos Aires to place of work and back. Almost
half of the 290 thousand immigrants per year in the decade 1904-13
turned around and left—an average of 135.7 thousand. This was an
economical arrangement from the Argentine point of view: bring in
harvesters and then send them away. It also suited the migrants, who
could exploit the inverse harvest season north and south of the equa-
nora
(Nora)
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