The Fate of Samuel J. Klein

On April 24, 1896, the head of the government office of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia dispatched a letter to the Hungarian Minister at the Imperial and Royal (k.u.k.) Hoflager in Vienna (the Hungarian minister at the Emperor’s office). Referring to earlier correspondence, the letter informed of the recent court verdict against an individual named Samuel J. Klein from the small Croatian town of Krapina. On March 31, 1896, the district court in Krapina had sentenced him to three days in jail and expulsion from the municipality.

Why did such a trivial court case that had resulted in a modest punishment draw the attention of high organs of the government of Croatia and of the Kingdom of Hungary, of which Croatia was an autonomous unit at that time? Samuel J. Klein began to attract the authorities’ attention in January 1896, when Austrian and Hungarian government bodies became aware of his petition to the Consul General of the Republic of Uruguay in Vienna (it seems that the Consul General sent it over to the Austrian authorities). Klein had asked for a concession to establish a colony in Uruguay in order to resettle 500 people. This triggered alarm bells with the authorities as settlement in Latin America was considered a sensitive issue in Austro-Hungarian government circles at that time.

The authorities in Vienna were concerned and called upon the local authorities in Croatia to inquire into this would-be colonizer and assess his reliability. The ensuing investigation by the authorities in Krapina, who interviewed Klein,[1] and by the Varaždin district revealed the contours of a colorful personality. At that time, Klein worked as the kosher butcher of the Jewish community in Krapina, earning some 600 crowns per year. He was supposedly born in Romania but held US-American citizenship, travelling with a passport issued by the US embassy in Paris in 1893. He was said to have moved from Romania first to London and from there to the United States eleven years previously, together with his uncle Jakob Rosenfeld. After a nine-year sojourn in the United States, he returned to Europe, taking quarters in Paris. In Paris, he requested permission from the Spanish embassy for the settlement of Russian and Romanian Jews in Venezuela; he also approached the government of Paraguay for the same reason, but in both cases was unsuccessful. While in Krapina, he turned to the Consul General of Uruguay in Vienna in January 1896 with a similar request, setting in motion the investigation that ultimately landed him in jail and got him kicked out of Krapina.

Klein provided a curious explanation as to why he had moved to a small provincial town in Croatia and took the position of the kosher butcher there. He applied for this job, which the Jewish community in Krapina had advertised in newspapers in Budapest, because he suffered from stomach complaints and hoped that the nearby spa of Krapina Toplice would provide a cure. The authorities, however, suspected a more sinister motive: Klein was said to be in contact with a certain Lazar Schwarz, who was the “head of a consortium” that traded young girls to America and “sold them there.”[2] Klein’s extraordinary language proficiency – he was said to speak German, French, English, Spanish, Romanian, and Hebrew – made him the ideal person for such a transnational endeavor. He would be the perfect middleman, as he probably also had contacts in London and America that could come handy for such a business. Klein, however, denied being in contact with the girls’ trafficker. He justified his plan to organize the emigration of Jews from Romania and Russia to Latin America by his humanitarian concerns for the Jews who suffered persecution in these countries. Representatives of the local Jewish community, who were interviewed by the gendarmerie, also vouched for Klein’s good character and described him as a very educated person.

The fact that Klein was sentenced only to a minor punishment by the district court in Krapina on March 31, 1896, which found him guilty of violating public order, suggests that the authorities could not really prove his involvement in a large-scale human trafficking enterprise. From the surviving record, we cannot establish whether Klein’s alleged philanthropic motives were just a pretext for finding a niche in the booming business of emigration agents in Croatia at that time, by catering to the small Jewish minority in the Kingdom. Most likely it was. What we can say with greater certainty, though, is that Klein showed innovative spirit by producing narratives that made sense at a time when overseas migration became a massive movement in the southeastern and eastern provinces of the Dual Monarchy. He neatly linked the sorry plight of Jews in Russia and Romania with the newly opening opportunities for colonization in Latin America. However, Klein was not the only one in this story who demonstrated innovative zeal: the state appeared to improve its capacity to track its citizens and control their movements, and to learn more about social relations also in its backyard in the process.

Migration and Social Innovation

In a relationship of mutual causation, the innovation of state control capacities is inherently connected with the practices from “below” to bypass, undermine, subvert, and overcome them. The migrant and the “human trafficker” are to the border control agent what the egg is to the hen, and vice versa.

Migration is often thought of as a force of innovative change. Patrick Manning, in his sweeping overview of thousands of years of human migration, considers “migration as an engine for social change” that contributed substantially to “the dynamics of ideas.”[3] Cross-community migration brings “new resources and new ideas into a receiving community” which “stimulates further innovation.”[4] Manning also emphasizes “the ubiquity of innovation and the benefits of systems of exchanging ideas.”[5] The thought that migration and innovation are linked seems to gain traction also in the public mind, at least among those not inherently disposed against immigration. A quick Ngram search reveals a steep uptick in the use of the phrase “migration and innovation” since around 2000 (see figure 1).

But where exactly can we locate the innovation and how can we identify a causal relation with migration? Human societies innovate and humans move – but are these processes mutually constitutive, and if so, what comes first?

One of the most influential philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant, was famous for his sedentary lifestyle in Königsberg and declined financially attractive offers to move to other German universities. So, ideas can travel without the persons who invented them ever moving. Twentieth and twenty-first century East Asian economies have demonstrated enormous potential for innovation, although Japan, South Korea, and China are generally hostile to immigration from foreign countries and consequently have much smaller foreign-born populations than many other countries. In the Global Innovation Index, no clear correlation between levels of migration and ranking is evident, while the most recent report of this initiative – which focuses on health – does not mention “migration” once on its more than 400 pages. It would also be easy to list examples from history where the new ideas and practices brought from somewhere else by mobile individuals had less than benign consequences for their new host societies.

Yet, there is – and this is my argument here – at least one area where we can clearly see innovation due to migration: at the border. This pertains to the increasingly sophisticated techniques employed by states to monitor and control movement, and to control those places (i.e., the state border) which render acts of physical mobility into migration in the first place. The “invention of the passport” (pace Torpey)[6] can serve as an illustration of what is at stake. In a relationship of mutual causation, the innovation of state control capacities is inherently connected with the practices from “below” to bypass, undermine, subvert, and overcome them. The migrant and the “human trafficker” are to the border control agent what the egg is to the hen, and vice versa. Nicholas De Genova, in his provocative analysis of migration policies in the Mediterranean, asserts that “state tactics of bordering have been abundantly shown to be convulsive reaction formations, responding always to the primacy of the sheer autonomy of migration.”[7] But the reverse relationship is true as well: once state borders have been turned into real obstacles, those who want to move across them will develop new tactics to realize their mobility goals, thus provoking the state to come up with new responses preventing their movement. Michael Schubert, in an analysis of attempts of the German Confederation to police cross-border migration, claims that “the illegalization of migration and migrants ultimately became a driving force in the formation of states. In its later development, the ability to define citizenship became the primary objective of a state.”[8]

Emigration, Borders, and the Habsburg State

If we are to look for examples of the productivity of state borders – “as the effect of histories to reactivate tactics on the part of state powers in response to these human movements and their double-faced, double-voiced politics of mobility and presence”[9] – Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a good place to start. At that time, the Dual Monarchy turned into the most important supplier of emigrants to the United States. It sent more than 3.5 million people there between 1876 and 1910, in roughly equal shares from both “halves” of the monarchy. This also meant that the Habsburg Monarchy became an attractive market for the North European steamship companies that controlled the Atlantic passenger traffic. They had greatly expanded their capacity with the advent of steam and new shipbuilding technologies for which they now searched for new customers, as the stream of emigrants from the British Isles and Western Europe was declining. They found them in Eastern Europe, in a zone stretching from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic. Despite some government efforts, Austria and Hungary, both of which had seaports with connections to the Americas, failed to make significant inroads into this business: the North Atlantic pool of big steamship lines was so commercially and politically powerful that it prevented upstarts from gaining a substantial slice of the steerage traffic.

While the developments in steamship technology and the organization of the steamship business, as well as improvements to port facilities, were important examples of migration-induced innovation in their own right, my focus here is on state-migrant interaction at the border. In this relationship, the term border does not refer to a clearly demarcated line where the state controls and restricts entry and exit, but refers to the practices of the state to regulate the movement and citizenship of citizens and non-citizens (a distinction less unequivocal than it might sound). Passport control at a domestic train station possessed the qualities of a border as did a decision taken by a local bureaucrat over whether to issue a passport or not, or the actions of a guard at the physical border. To put it in a more sophisticated (or perhaps convoluted?) way:

“Here, indeed, we may appreciate that borders are not simply spatial technologies but also operate in ways that are fundamentally dedicated to the temporal processing of distinct mobilities, ultimately consigning various categories of mobile people to one or another protracted trajectory of indeterminate and contingent subjection to the governmentalities of migration.”[10]

In this process, the border politics of one state invariably interacted with those of others, and not only with those of the immediate neighbors: naturalized Austro-Hungarian migrants experienced this when, upon returning from America, the Habsburg authorities wanted to conscript them into their army even though they held US citizenship.[11] The international system has developed from such interactions and intersections between different sovereigns. It is precisely this area where migration, or more accurately, the modern state’s impulse to control it, led to institutional and normative innovation (usually not to migrants’ benefit, though).

Austria-Hungary was a liberal emigration state yet its government(s) nevertheless initiated processes that triggered innovation on the part of both the migrants and their helpers, and of the state.[12] While citizens could leave relatively easily – in Cisleithania, emigration had even been a constitutional right since 1868, and the rather elaborate Hungarian emigration law did not do much to curtail it – the state still considered it its prerogative to regulate how people could exit. Prospective emigrants needed to have at least a valid emigration passport. The state also wanted to prevent the departure of certain population groups: young men who had not yet served in the army, individuals who would be barred from entering the United States or from transit through Germany, underage people, and criminals with pending cases at home. The Hungarian government tried to discourage Magyars from leaving while tacitly encouraging members of the non-Magyar minorities of its Kingdom to do so. Migration policy was thus in line with its nationalizing policies. A special case triggering government concerns was Brazil, which actively recruited immigrants from Austria and Hungary, many of whom would fall into destitution and apply for repatriation at the cost of their native government. This was the only case when Austria and Hungary banned emigration to a certain country, leading to special monitoring practices.

The governments in Vienna, Budapest, and Zagreb for that matter (Croatia enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy within Hungary) felt pressure from another source, which made them at least pretend to act on migration: public opinion. It seemed that the general population was becoming increasingly wary of mass emigration, bemoaning its harmful consequences. Depending on their political stance, critics of emigration deplored the loss of vital manpower for nation-building, feared for the emigrants’ morality in the far-away Americas, were concerned about the emigrants’ social plight overseas, worried about young women being forced into “white slavery”, or just invented any reason for the government to prevent the departure of cheap farm labor on which Polish and Hungarian landowners depended.[13] At a time of increasingly competitive politics – with Austria having introduced universal male suffrage in 1907 – governments could not so easily ignore public opinion. Indeed, the modern state per se would not want the image of its sovereign power over its territory and the people in it to be tainted by persons who freely ignored one of its pre-eminent prerogatives: to decide who is in and who is out, and to police the membrane where people transit from one stage to the other, i.e., the border.

The Invention of “Human Trafficking”

the border politics of one state invariably interacted with those of others, and not only with those of the immediate neighbors […] The international system has developed from such interactions and intersections between different sovereigns. It is precisely this area where migration, or more accurately, the modern state’s impulse to control it, led to institutional and normative innovation (usually not to migrants’ benefit, though).

In such a context, facilitators of migration easily became a convenient scapegoat. Today, too, their image could hardly be worse. Anti-immigration interest groups, media and policymakers routinely criminalize them, symbolized by the hardly positive associations evoked by the concept of “human traffickers”. The image of the human trafficker as someone exploiting hapless migrants to the point of jeopardizing their lives has become so normalized that some (right-wing) politicians even frame their calls for resolute efforts against “illegal migration” in pseudo-humanitarian language, pretending to want to protect would-be migrants from such nefarious criminals. The Austrian conservative chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the new poster-boy of moderate (and not so moderate) conservatives in Austria and beyond, is a case in point. He and others who present themselves as stalwarts in the fight against “illegal migration” remain silent about the reasons why migrants take up the help of “human traffickers”, some of whom are indeed criminals with little or no concern for the lives of their customers. But many, if not most, of the people facilitating migration are actually kin and friends, or friends of friends, who genuinely want to help migrants and refugees to achieve their mobility goals. Gabriella Sanchez, in her ethnographic exploration of so-called coyotes along the US-Mexican border, arrived at a “picture of smuggling as a community activity driven by solidarity.” This contrasted with the criminalization narrative of the state, which presented smugglers as “heinous monsters preying on the desperation and vulnerability of agency-deprived and manipulation-prone migrants”.[14]

More than a century ago in Austria-Hungary, public opinion was not in any way more sympathetic to the facilitators of migration. Then, the ire of press, lawmakers, and bureaucrats was directed against those who helped citizens of the Monarchy to leave. The rhetoric was very similar to today’s, presenting emigration agents and their subagents as nefarious criminals who preyed upon the naiveté of poor and illiterate peasants. Emigration (sub)agents were commonly presented as enticing ignorant peasants to take the risky journey across the Atlantic, while swindling them them, for example through over-charging or the selling of fake foreign currency, or in the case of Brazil: forcing them into indentured labor on coffee and sugar-cane plantations. In the Austro-Hungarian context, Tara Zahra discovered a heavy dose of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the public vilification of emigration agents. “By blaming mass emigration on Jewish agents, prosecutors and social reformers cast migrants as innocent victims of Jewish and capitalist machinations.”[15] One common trope running through the propaganda against “human traffickers” then as  now is the denial of migrants’ agency. Scapegoating migration agents is a convenient strategy for governments who fail to resolve the underlying reasons why people take to their services in the first place – or want to emigrate at all.

For the state, prosecuting migration facilitators is also a relatively easy and cheap instrument of maintaining its image of being the sovereign. A spectacular court case against emigration agents, such as the one in the Galician town of Wadowice in 1889 analyzed by Tara Zahra,[16] allowed the modern state to demonstrate its ability, or at least willingness, to safeguard one of its most cherished prerogatives: the control of movement across its borders. The irony was that the very problematization of the migration facilitators’ misdeeds cast a long shadow of doubt on the state’s own claims. In any case, the government’s fear that emigration agents would deprive it of one of the most important resources of modern statehood, (male) bodies, led to a surge in government activities, including legislative innovation.

In Austria, the active facilitation of emigration was already outlawed in 1852. An 1897 law made violations of the state-set rules for the emigration business a criminal offence but, at the same time, legalized the activities of emigrant agents if they had a government concession. However, they were still forbidden to actively recruit emigrants and to sell tickets for steerage on foreign steamship companies. Violations of these restrictions could result in up to two years’ imprisonment, or even three years under aggravated circumstances. Similar provisions were in place in Hungary, with the first established in 1881. The Hungarian Minister of Trade issued several decrees (in 1885, 1888, 1889, 1890, and 1891) which ordered postal officers not to deliver brochures advertising emigration and letters that were suspected of containing pre-paid tickets. The Croatian government, within its autonomous realm, outlawed emigration agents’ business in 1890. A 1901 decree regulating transportation firms licensed by the Croatian government specifically prohibited the use of agents by these companies when selling tickets for overseas travel. The decree outlawed any act intended to “encourage the workers and peasant population to travel or to migrate to overseas countries.”[17] To enforce these rules, the government increased its monitoring capacity and started to pay closer attention to what was happening in rural places that so far had received limited government attention. Zahra quotes a Hungarian report saying that in 1905–06, the Hungarian authorities monitored more than 1,500 persons suspected of encouraging emigration.[18]

The Emigration Agents Fight Back

Still, all these efforts to outlaw or at least regulate the business of emigration agents had primarily one effect: they spurred innovation on the side of the agents and their main business partners, large steamship lines that had a lot of steerage space to fill. Networks of agents could be vast and included many local intermediaries who enjoyed the trust of the local population and performed vital services for the recruitment and transportation of migrants. In the Wadowice trial, the prosecutors described the emigration agents’ operation like a criminal organization.[19] Large emigration agencies, such as F. Missler in Bremen, operated networks of hundreds or even thousands of agents and sub-agents. The major steamship companies were so powerful that they often ignored government restrictions – not least because it was their local sub-agents that got caught. In Austria, the largest network of mainly clandestine (sub-)agents was even operated by a steamship line that received significant government subsidies, the Austro-Americana.[20] In Hungary, non-licensed steamship companies continued to employ agents, even though this had been outlawed by the 1903 and 1909 Laws on Emigration. Countering the attempts of the Hungarian government to create a monopoly for its port of Fiume in the emigration business, the North Atlantic pool launched a successful media campaign in the United States. In 1911, Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Count Khuen-Héderváry conceded that despite “the most energetic measures” of the government, the business of agents had continued unabated. This was true even though in 1910 the Hungarian authorities had punished 1,968 people for violations of the ban on emigration agents and the encouragement of emigration.[21] Even the Austrian government, with its relatively well-functioning bureaucracy, failed to stamp out illicit emigration businesses. In 1913, the Austrian Minister of Trade conceded in parliament that “the continuous circumvention and the planned violation of existing laws and other regulations have become an outright characteristic of the emigration business.”

Consequently, these frequent bans and restrictions, together with all the government ingenuity in persecuting emigration agents, did not achieve its aims, other than making the lives of these facilitators and their customers more difficult. Emigration agents often found flexible solutions, for example by re-routing the emigrant traffic. Another example from Austria illustrates this process. Most overseas emigrants from Austria and Hungary left through Hamburg or Bremerhaven, so they had to pass through Germany. Many of them used to cross the border near the town of Oświęcim, in Austrian Galicia. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Prussian police began to inspect emigrants coming from Austria (and Russia) more thoroughly. This was also caused by more stringent immigration restrictions in the United States. Germany tried to avoid potential costs incurred when migrants were sent back by U.S. immigration officials.[22] This was a problem for many emigrants, because they did not have proper travel documents. Again, increased state control spurred innovation on the side of the facilitators of migration.

In a matter of months, the flow of emigrants was redirected through Switzerland. The sleepy Swiss border town of Buchs suddenly became a major transit center for emigrants from East-Central and Southeastern Europe. This was due to the fact that the train from Innsbruck in Austria to Buchs in Switzerland passed through Liechtenstein, and there was no effective border control at the Austrian-Liechtenstein border.[23] It is estimated that up to 100,000 emigrants left annually through Vorarlberg and Switzerland. Many emigrants from Croatia, for example, went through Buchs. They were enticed by the Swiss emigration agency Viktor Klaus, which employed many agents in Croatia. When the Austrian police broke up one of these clandestine networks in the autumn of 1913 they discovered an elaborate business operation, which included ten agents in Croatia (one of them was a district official).[24] As a reaction to the relocation of the emigrant flow, the Austrian police intensified inspections on trains to Switzerland. Police, for example, arrested men liable for conscription at the train station in Innsbruck because they were traveling to Buchs and therefore suspected of attempted emigration. Border control was internalized, prefiguring de-territorialized border controls in today’s Schengen Zone in the EU.

The emigration agencies, of course, reacted to these police measures and adapted to them. For example, they stopped issuing train tickets to ‘suspicious’ destinations, such as Buchs or Lindau in Germany, but instead issued tickets only for short sections of the journey. The Viktor Klaus Agency created a special scheme for emigrants from Croatia, which included several transfers and the purchase of tickets for individual sections only. The advert (see right-hand side illustration below) even included a warning to the emigrants: when changing trains in Innsbruck, “Do not leave the train station and do not enter into conversation with anyone that would expose you” to plain clothes police (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). The Viktor Klaus agency even tried to disguise emigrants as seasonal workers headed to the province of Vorarlberg and provided them with forged work papers.[25]

At the end, in late 1913, the Austrian military, which for a long time had warned of the dangers of emigration for its recruitment targets, had its way. After yet another scandal involving a major shipping line that stood accused to transport conscripts to America, the Austrian government was finally pushed by the army to enforce existing restrictions on emigration.[26] It did so by drawing on the knowledge and control techniques it had developed in the preceding years.

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Conclusion

the powers of the state to effectively control migration might be limited, but not its capacity to develop new techniques of de-territorialized border controls, including the demonstration of its sovereign power over bodies using techniques that can come handy in other areas where the state wants to classify, control, direct, include and exclude people

What I have shown here, is a way of considering the interface and intersection between state action to control migration on the one hand, and the agency of migrants and their helpers on the other, as an important field of lasting innovations. Governments felt challenged by newly emerging businesses that offered transportation across borders to those who were not entitled to do so. In turn, governments developed new techniques of monitoring such people and their movements. Those in that line of business, on the other hand, found new solutions to new restrictions, regardless of whether they were driven by a profit motive, by humanitarian concerns or by sentiments of reciprocity. As Sanchez has observed, they “effectively navigate the constraints of their marginalization by fulfilling an essential need within an also marginal community.”[27] The same author concludes that the actions of facilitators of migration “not only show the de-territorialized character of the border, but their success at promoting migration constitutes a direct challenge to the very state desperate to re-establish its diminishing powers.”[28] A state, it is worth adding, rarely leaves such a challenge unmet: the powers of the state to effectively control migration might be limited, but not its capacity to develop new techniques of de-territorialized border controls, including the demonstration of its sovereign power over bodies using techniques that can come in handy in other areas where the state wants to classify, control, direct, include and exclude people.

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