The Great Departure: Emigration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

In the last 150 years, millions of East Europeans have left their homes for Western Europe and the Americas, irrevocably changing both their new lands and the ones they left behind. Their emigration fostered the notion that movement is linked to freedom and social mobility. And yet, as villages emptied, many East Europeans worried that migrants were instead being delivered to new forms of slavery and demoralization abroad. Some compared emigration to human trafficking, blaming Jewish emigration agents for the mass departure, and demanding tighter restrictions on mobility. Others saw opportunity: to seed colonies of migrants like the Polish community in Argentina, or to gain economic advantage from an inflow of foreign currency, or to reshape their populations by encouraging the emigration of minorities. These precedents shaped the closing of the Iron Curtain and new practices of ethnic cleansing, while also informing the development of new forms of transnational social protection, human rights, and freedom―whether it be the freedom to move or the freedom to stay home.