EXAMINING PATTERNS OF ITALIAN IMMIGRATION TO ...

the contracts of transportation. This law did not include any direct intervention of the state in
the matter of assistance to the emigrants. In 1901 a new law did so. First of all it introduced
the vettore as a person legally appointed by a navigation company to recruit emigrants. The
vettore substituted for the agente dell’emigrazione, persons that acted by themselves during
the first years of the Italian emigration to speculate more or less legally on the need for
information and assistance to emigrate. The law also instituted the Commissariato per
l’Emigrazione, an organization dependent on the Department of Foreign Affairs. Consuls
working for the Commissariato produced inquiries and studies on Italian communities all over
the world that were then published in the Bollettino dell’Emigrazione. The aristocratic class
extraction of most of the consuls, though, prevented them from having a clear understanding
of the problems and conditions of the emigrants. Moreover, the law did not introduce any kind
of help for emigrants in the countries of destination, leaving Italy without any sort of
international agreement to facilitate the entering of emigrants into foreign labor markets. It
left ample ways of action to private associations, though.
The Catholic Church was one of the first to act and help immigrants, both in the
United States and in other countries of Italian emigration. The San Raffaele Society, founded
by Monsignor Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, opened missions all over the Americas. The
“scalabriniani” assisted immigrants both before their departure, helping them in dealing with
agents and navigation companies, and at their arrival helping them to find a job and to
integrate. 14
In the United States the situation for the immigrants wasn’t that different. Up until the
1930s the state did little to help immigrants to face the many challenges they had in the new
country. Once in the United States assistance to the immigrants came mainly from the private
sector: religious people connected to the Protestant churches, and laymen belonging to the
progressive movement. They assisted immigrants in the search for a job, a house - subtracting
them from the hands of the padroni - and to better understand the complicated American laws
concerning immigration.
Since the beginning of the great immigration, only the entrepreneurs were favorable to
an unlimited arrival of people from Southeast Europe. Others had fears of a different nature:
political, because of assumed subversive elements; social, because of assumed criminality;
14 Beccherini, Francesco. Il Fenomeno dell’Emigrazione negli Stati Uniti. Sansepolcro: Tipografia
Boncompagni, 1906.
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