(Author's note: This essay draws heavily from Dorothy Schwieder’s Iowa: The Middle Land.)
Waves of immigrants swarmed onto the Iowa prairies to settle the state from river to river in the 19th century. For the most part, they came from northern Europe and the British Isles. While they represented an ethnic diversity, their shared Anglo-Saxon ancestry made them able to assimilate fairly easily into mainstream American society, especially in the second and third generations.
The decade ending in 1890 marked the peak for foreign-born Iowa residents at 324,000 out of a total population of 1,900,000, approximately one out of every six Iowans. Today the figure stands at 138,000 foreign-born out of some 3,000,000, one out of twenty-two.
Historians often describe immigration in terms of push-pull factors. Push factors are difficult or threatening conditions in the native country that make relocation seem the best choice. The growth of the population, poverty, hunger, political oppression and a bleak future induced many to sell whatever they had and book passage to America. Despite the disappearance of free land, America’s hunger for labor created a “pull” factor for those wanting to flee Europe. America’s eastern urban population exploded in cities like Boston, New York, and Pittsburg. Faster, safer, and cheaper transportation made the Atlantic crossing less formidable. As with earlier groups, encouragement by countrymen who had relocated and wanted other family members to join them were important factors promoting the move.
Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing until after WWI, the origins of new arrivals shifted to southern and eastern Europe. They filled factory jobs in the rapidly-expanding, low-skilled manufacturing industries of the industrial Northeast. In Iowa, with cheap government land no longer available, they filled jobs in coal mining, the railroads, and meat packing plants. Like earlier groups, they tended to settle with fellow countrymen when they could and re-established familiar cultural conditions in a new setting as best they could.
Earlier, Iowa had welcomed the newcomers and even actively promoted immigration by printing brochures in native languages touting the advantages of the Hawkeye state. Around the turn of the century, however, anxieties of the native-born fearing the loss of control in a democracy began to surface. Many newcomers were from Catholic countries that put them at odds with established Protestant majorities. In the 1920s, the United States adopted immigration quotas that restricted the more recent newcomers to preserve the native-born Protestant dominance.
Italians were among the first of the new wave to reach Iowa. The first decade of the 20th century saw a jump in Iowans born in Italy, from 1,200 to 5,850 but that began a slow decline after that. According to Dorothy Schwieder’s Iowa: The Middle Land, early arrivals tended to come from northern Italy.
Migration in 19th century America was often a family affair, even including three generations. On a farm, children’s labor was often essential to the success of the operation. Many Italians, however, were poor, lacked education, and had few work skills beyond farming small plots of land. Instead of migrating as families, Italian men often came over on their own. They readily took jobs in coal mining. The newcomer would sponsor a younger relative by loaning money for a boat ticket and securing him a mining job when he arrived.
To support the family, Italian women often took in boarders to their home, sometimes for two dollars a week. They fed, housed, and provided a friendly environment that helped to acclimate the newly arrived to the American scene. Italian men working in mining or meat packing normally learned English quickly, but because so much of Italian women’s work was in the home, many first-generation Italian women never learned English.
Some Italians migrated to Iowa cities, especially those with meat processing plants. The south side of Des Moines developed a strong Italian community with men working in brick and tile works, on the many railroad lines that converged on Iowa’s capital, and in small businesses like repair or groceries. St. Anthony’s Catholic Church retains its strong ethnic roots. The community established a newspaper and supported several lodges that provided social outlets and advertised jobs and other news to their members. Oelwein attracted an Italian population who worked in the rail yards.
Eastern European groups also looked to Iowa in the early years of the 20th century. In the Iowa census of 1885, Bohemians living in Iowa hit a high-water mark of 10,423. Many settled in Cedar Rapids or the surrounding area where they farmed, worked for the railroads, or pursued skills and crafts. They often blended with Czech arrivals. Today the Czech Village/New Bohemia Main Street District in Cedar Rapids celebrates the heritage of these Iowa immigrants.
The Jews represent a unique immigration story. As defined by Rabbi Steven Fink, Jews are both a people and a religious movement. One can be Jewish by birth even if one does not follow the Jewish religion. The Iowa story includes Jews of different religious persuasions and national origins.
In the 19th century, German Jews began immigrating to America. While most stayed along the East Coast, some made their way to Iowa where they took jobs as peddlers selling goods from carts to farms. Eventually, they opened stores, especially clothing stores, in small towns and buying wholesale from Jewish factory owners in Chicago. In Des Moines, many of these Jewish merchants were quite successful financially and built large homes on the west side of the city. They abandoned traditional dress, learned English quickly, liberalized some Jewish religious traditions, and sought to become a recognized part of the American mainstream. However, discrimination persisted among the predominantly Christian society, and they were not recognized as social equals.
In 1881, an anarchist assassinated Czar Alexander II setting off sharp Russian reprisals against minorities. Repression of the Jews followed, and emigration to the U.S. spiked. Like earlier Jewish immigrants to America, most made new homes along the Atlantic Coast, but some kept traveling inward and arrived in Des Moines. These newcomers were, according to Fink, “ethnic.” They continued traditional dress and religious traditions, continued to speak Yiddish, were not eager to be absorbed into American society, and tended to settle in east Des Moines. The Westsider Jews had worked hard to gain some modicum of acceptance and to some extent considered the new arrivals an embarrassment. The more liberal Jewish congregations became known as Reform Jews while the Eastsiders became the Orthodox. Eventually a middle ground was established with a group termed the Conservative Jews. The peak decades of new arrivals from Russia peaked from 1890 at 2,000 Russian-born Iowa residents to 7,400 in 1910.
In the decade following World War I, native-born Americans experienced a growing anxiety about the numbers of immigrants accepted each year. A primary concern was the growing number of arrivals from central and Eastern Europe, many of whom were refugees and displaced persons from war zones. Being poor, they often occupied urban slums. A few advocated for socialist or other revolutionary ideologies. Again, many were Catholics, touching off anxieties among white Protestants that “their” America was being threatened. One manifestation of this fear was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan across the Midwest with Catholics as a primary target.
In 1924, Congress passed a restriction on immigration setting a quota of just 3% of the total number of immigrants who had arrived in 1910. Furthermore, the law assigned quotas per country based on statistics from the 1890 census. This meant that nations from Northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and the British Isles—would have higher quotas that those from Eastern Europe whose numbers had swelled in the decade leading up to WWI. The Japanese were excluded entirely at the insistence of West Coast states.
Hispanics have long had a presence in Iowa. With labor shortages during WWI, vegetable gardeners in SE Iowa recruited Mexican workers to work during harvest season. Some stayed, but many returned home on an annual basis to return the next year. Bettendorf developed a permanent Hispanic community along the Mississippi River. The big jump in Latinx immigration arrived in the 1970s when the meat-packing industry underwent a technological revolution. Where once the butchering and dressing process required skilled workers who were protected by unions, assembly-line technology reduced the operation to a series of processes that required little training and could be done by unskilled workers. The companies hired Hispanics willing to work the difficult hours in unpleasant surroundings, and those populations in cities with meat plants experienced a rapid rise in Spanish-speaking immigrants. Denison, Storm Lake, Marshalltown, Perry, and Muscatine today host Iowa’s largest clusters of Hispanic residents.
Iowa also became a haven for refugees fleeing from war and its aftermath. In the 1970s, Gov. Robert Ray toured refugee camps in SE Asia after the devastating wars there and then took the initiative to invite some of the victims to live in Iowa. He set up a task form to help resettle Laotian refugees displaced by the Vietnam War. He coordinated efforts by Iowa churches and other humanitarian organizations to provide housing, English language training, and employment.
Over the next two decades, Iowa became home to refugees from Congo, Syria, and the Dominican Republic. Bosnians were classified as true refugees by the U.S. government and given permission to resettle here, having been driven from their homes in the face of threatened genocides. The 2000 census reported a Bosnian population of around 5,700, by far the largest continent of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia.
According to a PBS special production on the subject: ”Most Bosnians are very well educated and highly literate. Many Bosnians in Iowa were professionals in their home country. In fact, most were doctors, nurses, teachers and business leaders. Many would like to resume their professions in the United States, although many find themselves working in positions well beneath their skills level. Differing professional guidelines, lost or destroyed certifications and language barriers hinder many refugees’ ability to transition into similar positions in Iowa.”
In recent years, Kosovo, the smallest nation carved from the former Yugoslavia, has developed unique ties with Iowa through a partnership with the Iowa National Guard, some legal organizations, DMACC, and Graceland University. Kosovo now supports its only U.S. consulate in Des Moines.
Recent shifts in American policies towards immigrants have made it more difficult for newcomers to arrive in the Hawkeye State. Concern for illegal immigration has pushed some politicians to want to make coming to America, especially across the southern border, a major political issue. Nevertheless, immigrants over Iowa’s 175 years of statehood have greatly increased and enriched the diversity of the Iowa’s population.