The so-called Foreign Colonies - Reasons for Their Existence and Ways to Nationalize Immigrants

Carlos María Ramírez Álvarez y Obes (1848-1898) was a Uruguayan journalist, essayist, novelist, and politician born in Rio Grande del Sur, Brazil. He graduated in Jurisprudence in 1868 and started his journalism career in the newspaper El Siglo, where he expressed his opposition to General Lorenzo Batlle's government. Due to his strong stance, he was deported to Buenos Aires with his brother Gonzalo.

Ramírez joined the Colorado Party during the Revolution of the Lances but soon became disillusioned and focused on creating a new political movement, the Constitutional Party. He taught constitutional law at the University of the Republic and later held various public positions, including Fiscal of Government and Finance and Uruguay's Legation in the Empire of Brazil.

During Lorenzo Latorre's period, Ramírez dedicated himself to researching national history. He compiled his political ideas in a pamphlet titled "La guerra civil y los partidos políticos del Uruguay" (1882), which outlined the basic principles of the projected Constitutional Party. He was involved in the creation of the newspaper El Plata, which served as the voice of his ideology.

Ramírez participated in the first Pedagogical Congress in South America held in Buenos Aires in 1882. In addition to his political activities, he wrote novels, essays, and several posthumously published works. He was appointed Minister of Finance in Juan Lindolfo Cuestas' government in 1891 and later served as a Senator from 1893 to 1898.

Here I translate a two-part article Ramírez published in 1871, in La Bandera Radical.

La Bandera Radical, 18 June 1871: Year 1, Number 21.

FIRST ARTICLE

During the three years in which the daily press offered us a place, we remember with pleasure having devoted our intelligence and time to the unpleasant elucidation of legal issues regarding diplomatic immunities, the extension of the right of asylum, justice, and opportunity for foreign claims, and many others among the most serious that the jurisprudence of modern nations entails.

What motivated us to deal with these tedious matters was undoubtedly not the inclinations of a legalistic spirit, by which, far from feeling dominated, we have always felt an instinctive repulsion. It is not the confusing laws written by men or nations in their variable codes and statutes but rather the simple law engraved by the Orderer of the world in the natural essence of human relations, the great object of study that has always presented itself with enchantment to our eyes. And undoubtedly, that is why we experienced true intellectual pleasure when we descended to explore the labyrinth of contradictions that the internal law presents.

These high sentiments are impenetrable in their depth and reproducing them in words is like trying to capture a fleeting breeze. It is possible to capture the sentiments only with a general approach to the resolutions adopted. The principle, the sentiment of sovereignty and national independence, led us to discover supreme importance in fixing the just limit in which the country's jurisdiction should only yield its rights to the respect and rights of a foreign power. The eminent Vico speaks to us of civic modesty; an Oriental publicist has developed this expression, telling us of republican modesty; before civic or republican modesty, there is patriotic modesty.

New and weak peoples of America and the South have found themselves in a peculiar situation concerning the powerful nations that exist in the Old World; needing population and capital to complement the efficient development of their laws and achieve complete control of their destinies, they have had to maintain generous and cordial relations with the European states that could provide them with those indispensable instruments of organization and progress but in determining this consecutive and immediate contact and producing such a vast increase in the natural solidarity of nations, a highly dangerous situation has been created.

The Spanish American peoples have appeared as servile tributaries of other peoples; they have gathered in their midst all kinds of heterogeneous and diverse elements; they have presented a body without unity or strength of their own to the abusive pretensions of the great powers with whom they have inevitably placed themselves in a very close alliance of interests and destinies.

From here has resulted that very special jurisprudence that Europe has tried to impose on America, equating it in its international relations with the semi-savage peoples of the East; that very special jurisprudence which has cost so many contributions to the honor and wealth of all South American peoples, and particularly the two Republics of the Plata.

It is true, as General Mitre observes in a recent article, that the abusive demands have always encountered discussion and protest, so that the principles have been saved within the scope of reason and law; America can claim as a triumph of its own doctrines, in a high degree, the declaration that has compensated, to a certain extent, for the damages suffered by its British subjects in the course of the Franco-German war.

However, the great national question is not yet resolved with the honest and loyal recognition of the principles that should serve as a basis for it, by someone who is generally acknowledged to possess remarkable competence as a statesman.

Inside our house, there is an Italian colony, a Spanish colony, a French colony, a German colony, a Brazilian colony, a British colony, and many others... Where does the Oriental sovereignty stand?

These are not agricultural, industrial, or commercial colonies spontaneously formed by accidental interaction and governed by the common principles of civil societies; no! They are genuine projections of the motherland, strongly organized with the bond of their nationality of origin, aspiring to form a distinct entity under the protection and direction of their respective diplomatic Minister, or even their respective consular agent!

They don't think with our ideas, nor speak our language, nor live with our customs, nor familiarize themselves with our institutions, nor blend with our nationality.

Concentrated within their own circles, each of the so-called foreign colonies imprints its own special character on everything that belongs to them and everything related to them. If they engage in trade, we have English trade, German trade, Italian trade, etc. If they acquire real estate, we come across the flag announcing a Spanish property, a French property, etc. If they raise offspring, a false baptismal certificate comes, which, in defiance of all our laws, maintains the perpetuity of the nationality of origin and isolates the indigenous population amidst an immense sea of foreign aggregations!

How can we explain this recent phenomenon, which, upon observation, cannot help but raise doubts and patriotic hesitations in our souls? Is it the work of our institutions, the work of our laws? No, because our institutions are far superior to those of the peoples who favor us with their immigration - no, because our laws open up the broadest field for the unification of all the elements that may be welcomed in the country.

The codes establish perfect equality of civil rights between natives and foreigners; taxes do not weigh more heavily on the latter than on the former; even our rivers are open to all the flags of the world.

As for exercising public rights, it is enough to say that we offer citizenship with as much generosity as the most generous nation on earth. In vain, General Pacheco said that if old Rome existed in all its splendor, he would not exchange the title of Oriental citizen for that of a Roman citizen. We must acknowledge with sorrow that this is not generally thought of in this way; a false document would today be much more valuable to many people than the genuine title of an Oriental citizen.

The laws of the United States, whose liberality towards foreigners is often praised, are far from offering as many privileges as our laws; it is enough to point out two aspects of North American legislation to understand its spirit - one cannot be a landowner or a bank director without being a citizen of the Union.

If we were to establish these principles, we would not achieve foreigners becoming naturalized to be property owners or bankers, but we would make them emigrate to other countries instead of having them as guests. Common sense has always told us that we must open wide all doors through which the immigrants of the world may feel enticed to enter our home.

With this idea in mind, we have not done everything that can be done, but we have done enough to demonstrate that our laws are not the real cause of the profound national anarchy in which we live.

Could it be our habits, our customs, our sociability? Anyone who knows the country knows that foreigners are everywhere and are received by everyone with spontaneous demonstrations of cordiality and sympathy.

Their race and religion do not concern anyone in the slightest.

In the family and industry, society and commerce, they are received as friends and brothers.

At every step, their opinion is invoked, and their cooperation is sought.

Governments seek their support, and revolutionaries place their hopes in them.

From there, the foreign population is sought after by the law and sought after by men who identify entirely with our own national life, and yet they remain indifferent, detached, entrenched in the traditionalism of their existing traditions, contradicting in a way the age-old wisdom of the adage that tells us: where there is property, there is the homeland.

How can we explain this phenomenon?

For our part (and in a forthcoming article, we hope to demonstrate this clearly), we believe this is the inevitable result of our old factions and the ongoing civil war in which they are embroiled.

La Bandera Radical, 2 July 1871: Year 1, Number 23

SECOND ARTICLE

Jules Duval, the illustrious historian of human migration in the 19th century, wrote that towards the end of 1856, when the population was flocking more strongly to North America, a party formed in some parts of the Union that, exaggerating the famous principle of Monroe, aimed to put limitations on the introduction of foreign elements. This party worked and agitated everywhere; propaganda, public meetings, the organization of conventions, and even some popular excesses were the visible signs with which it appeared on the scene, without achieving anything other than to maintain itself on it for the brief space of two years.

By 1856, the Know-Nothing party had completely disappeared because public sentiment rejected the idea of finding a national danger in the great phenomenon that had contributed so much to the development of the United States.

If a similar party were to appear in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, its existence would also be equally precarious and temporary; but for very different reasons than those that produced the same outcome in the Republic of the North. Whether our patriotic susceptibilities want it or not, without foreign capital or a foreign population, our nationality would never attain the necessary elements to call itself such and rise on the ladder of progress, following the harmonic movement of humanity. The immigration that comes to our shores could be a great national danger. Yet, we would be morally forced to receive it because the opposite intention, the isolation of Paraguay during the reign of Francia and Lopez, the consummation of all possible dangers, would imply suicide.

The American Union finds itself, and found itself since the mid-19th century, in a very different situation, because it already contained everything necessary to constitute a great association of its own life and growing influence on the destiny of all humanity. Suppose the Union opens its doors to the emigrant classes of Europe. In that case, it is not so much to increase the population of the lands it already occupies, but to satisfy its colossal aspirations for expansion, invading like a continuous tide, with the wave of the most beautiful civilization in the world, the fertile deserts that extend around its States.

In general, North Americans are accused of being conquerors, but the true conquest they carry out, without needing any other, is the conquest of virgin nature and the exhausted elements that Europe sends to revitalize its essence in the powerful source of democratic institutions. Within the Union, the foreigner immediately identifies his life with the life of the people he joins because, from the very first moment, he sees the development of the interests he brings or the realization of the future he hopes for linked to the unfolding of that life. The vague memory of the homeland consecrated by the tradition of sentiment is overshadowed by the active consciousness of a new homeland that attracts him with the generous offering of man's most necessary and esteemed goods. The head of the family may die in the old religion, but the new religion remains in his home, and the descendants of the fortunate emigrant know and love only the same homeland in which they were born.

Such is the force of national assimilation that the United States, offering liberalities to immigration, have come to declare that the children of foreigners can choose at their discretion between their nationality of origin and their nationality of birth - (See Jules Duval - Emigration in the 19th century: page 189.) How not to see that the United States have done so, like the mother who offers ample freedom to her tender children, sure that filial love will keep them constantly in her care!

With similar institutions and with an equally hospitable character, as we demonstrated in our first article, the Oriental Republic, as it advances in its independent career and progresses as a receptacle for foreign immigration, manages only to form a juxtaposition of colonies, under whose regime and preponderance, nationality loses its strength, dignity, and prestige. It is governed by the same psychological laws as the opposite phenomenon observed in the great Republic of the North. The foreigner comes to our shores; he is attracted by the fame of our fields' fertility, the high remuneration of work, or the ease with which he can advance in the various careers of commerce. We now have him transplanted to our soil. Let's watch him grow like an exotic plant.

People have an irresistible tendency to inform themselves about the issues being debated in the land where they live, an irresistible tendency to establish immediate and permanent communication with the society in which their person is and where their interests are rooted. It is the effect of the instinct for sociability, on the one hand, and intelligent and foresighted selfishness, on the other - selfishness and sociability, two inseparable feelings of the human heart. Obeying these feelings, the foreigner directs an inquisitive gaze at the political stage of the country and finds a fierce struggle between two factions that do not represent any practical program of principles, reforms, improvements, or any of the aspirations that can favor or flatter the legitimate conveniences of a man completely alien to the traditions of a people. He finds the fierce struggle of two factions that tear each other apart to death for slogans and passions of a dark past where virtue and crime, glory and ferocity, are all involved in an indecipherable enigma of civil convulsions, as terrible as the most terrible ones that the annals of humanity have known. Finally, he finds the sterile and bloody debate of historical divisions that have always led nations astray when seeking the peaceful and fruitful movement of the forces that operate in the growth of societies and the happiness of their members! Then comes the reaction of sociability and selfishness. The foreigner turns his gaze away from that dark picture and looks for the center among his fellow nationals where he can expand his feelings and achieve the irresistible community of legitimate interests. We would be very mistaken if this is not the deep internal cause that outlines, at the heart of our sociability, the unique creation of foreign colonies.

Here, as always, the exception only serves to confirm the rule. There was a moment when all the inhabitants of the country, or at least the capital where its vital forces are concentrated, came together in a single national sentiment, fighting for the exact cause in a heroic defense. It was because, at that time, the struggle had been defined in clear and specific terms, revealing to all foreigners the interests at stake in the conflict and also the combatants where general interests found representation and protection. Subsequently, disastrous events occurred; the factions were fatally reconstituted with their old leaders at the helm; a continuous succession of equal mistakes and crimes became the prominent feature of the struggle. And then, the identification of a great moment began to break apart; sympathies that were once concentrated in one point became divided and wavered uncertainly from one extreme to the other until they turned away from both, definitively establishing the deep national divorce that is characterizing itself with the new aggregations of forces that, in a different situation, should strengthen and bring splendor to the Nation.

The phenomenon described would lose much of its influence if the struggle of the historical parties did not inevitably take on the form of a chronic war. In times of peace, even if only for economic interests and the realization of the physiocratic motto - laissez-faire, laissez-passer - the munificence of nature and work would reconcile the foreigner with the intrinsic conditions of the country, and their descendants would come to form a center where political transformations would find the most vigorous resources for their action. The constant civil war has very diverse effects, in which the parties set the Republic ablaze.

The first to suffer the effects of this scourge are labor, capital, and the general wealth of the country. Just when the foreigner begins to savor the fruit of their toil and gather the harvest of their efforts, political convulsions hinder the progress of mercantile business and relax all the springs of industrial activity. The convulsion passes quickly, and when hopes were about to be reborn with the prosperity of labor, the political convulsion comes to cover the horizon with the glow of destruction and bloodshed.

Thus, years go by under the fatal regime of anarchy, with no more respite than brief moments of armistice. That land, which God and institutions made generously hospitable, is turned by our parties into a treacherous trap of turmoil and ruin. Instead of forming a beautiful Eden, people seem determined to create an inferno.

In this way, immigration will retreat from our ports; emigration will begin in our own home; and if, for providential reasons concerning the future of the Republic, emigration does not occur on a large scale and immigration continues to flow excessively, we will see colonies take shape, not just as a social phenomenon, but as a political organization. Civil war brings plunder, dispossession, and humiliations that the foreign population cannot bear with impunity since none of their positive interests are involved in the causes and outcomes of that war. They suffer losses without compensation; they are ruined without recognizing a just cause that justifies sacrificing everything that linked them to our land. How can you expect them not to complain? How can you expect them not to defend their most legitimate rights? How can you expect them not to turn to the authorities of their country if yours cannot compensate or even put an end to their grievances?

There is even more to the issue. It is well known that civil war stimulates and develops the violent tendencies of people; periods of political upheaval are always times of excess and private crimes. As if the state that a famous philosopher assumes to be natural for humans were the case, or at least the state before the human condition, it is true that bloodshed has an intoxicating and contagious influence within political societies. Murders are the inevitable entourage of war. The most valuable asset, life, which can never be replaced, is left at the mercy of the most terrible threats. Meanwhile, the force of social repression disappears. In the dire necessities of the struggle, a criminal becomes a soldier, if not a leader, and it would be foolish to deprive oneself of him. In supreme moments, which are constantly repeated, a battalion is formed from the public jail that soon becomes a veteran and a patriot. All the mechanisms of the judicial administration are relaxed, and the sense of justice loses its energy in all the magistracies of the country. There are no guarantees for human life, nor punishment for murderers. Do you think foreigners will let themselves be killed with impunity? Do you think they will not seek someone to guarantee their lives? Do you think they will not try by all possible means to find punishment for the criminals who have preyed on their countrymen? At every step, we have to see that foreign ministers, harassed by their subjects and representing the dearest interests of their citizens, demand that those accused of crimes committed on our territory be tried outside of our territory, as Mr. Munro did not long ago in notes as truthful as they are depressing about our social state.

Here is why in our country there are these colonies of immigrants with an exclusive spirit, with their own interests, with an independent existence, constantly demanding the intervention of an authority that represents and satisfies their peculiar collective needs.

Rejected from identification with our historical parties, each national group concentrates within its own circle; without protection for its members' property and life in the constant turmoil of war, it naturally aspires to form a government that ensures the enjoyment of these fundamental rights.

By themselves, nothing is lacking for these national groups to constitute colonies; it is necessary to recognize that they have had reason to be called that way.

Can this situation last?

Are there ways to repair such great evils?

We will express our opinion in another article.

A copy of the original in Spanish is available here.