Immigration Inspector Marcus Braun: Linking Migrant Experiences with Governmental Policy

The study of transatlantic migration inherently links levels of analysis, as individual migrants encountered often not one but two governmental bureaucracies managing migration: that of their home state and their destination state. In the case of migrants from the Habsburg Empire to the United States, both the United States Bureau of Immigration and the Austrian and particularly Hungarian governments exercised broad powers in managing migration. A fruitful point to link levels of analysis is to look at go-betweens who mediated the relationship between migrants and governments, and thus to link the grassroots social history of migration with high-level diplomatic history. Marcus Braun, an immigrant from Hungary himself, was a Special Inspector for the US Bureau of Immigration in the first decade of the 20^th century. Braun’s active role in the Hungarian-American community in New York, his work in Europe studying migrant trafficking for the U.S. government, and his later attempts to establish a new immigrant community in Florida reveal many of the challenges and failures of migrants, go-betweens, and governments at navigating transatlantic migration. Comparing and contrasting Braun’s career to more conventional diplomats also reveals where go-betweens were most in-touch and out-of-touch with migrants’ and governmental concerns.