Emigration and immigration -
what have we learned?
Beginning of the emigration journey from Norway.
The following story is a comment on emigration/immigration written by a college of me in Trønder-Avisa, the newspaper where I work.
The comment written by John Arne Moen tells in a good way why half the population in Norway went to America between 1820 and 1920. And how we look upon immigration to Norway today.
Svein Helge Falstad
---
This is what John Arne Moen had on print december 24th 2014:
"And when the Christmas porridge is eaten and I look at the Christmas stars I will I on the Bridge of memories and revisited yearning look into old places at home." These words wrote Robert Jeremiah Norheim right before Christmas, after he as solitary 16-year-old emigrated from Kvam in North Trondelag to the US in 1894.
Robert is long dead, but the words he sent home to parents and siblings on the smallholding in the north of Steinkjer, gives him still life and soul.
Just before Christmas, Tronder-Avisa (The Tronder newspaper) launched "Uncle in America" - a mostly online article series that throughout the winter and spring to take us into the most comprehensive social upheaval in Norway after the Black Death: The emigration to America. The story gives reason for thought - when Norway has turned to such a degree, that we have become one of the world immigrant communities.
Emigration has "always" fascinated us. I am no exception. Ever since I was a child heard my father and his older brother talk about letters from America, who came all the way to grandmother died, in the first half of the 1970s - this part of the story remained in me. For three generations left about half of young herd motherland in favor of a better future "over there." They first who went left a remote, trackless mountain hamlet without any significant information about what awaited. They were pioneers in the world's most comprehensive, voluntary migration - which changed both "The old" and "The new" world. They subsequently solved ticket knew more - but for them the choice was essentially finally, in a way we today hardly can to put us into.
The Norwegian America and "those who went" was a part of our collective memory and understanding - until oil age struck the fjord. The First World War put an end to emigration wave, and when peace came after about four years, was much changed - and it all flattened out. Most of the last ones who left for America, left this world when we got to the 1980s - as did their surviving relatives here in Norway. Then the road to collective forgetfullness was short.
As a young local newspaper editor, I received just before Christmas in 1984 a letter from a fellow townsman emigrated in the 90s. Machine written - and inside was two - three images, including one of Hegra Church - in the middle of the prairie in Minnesota somewhere. (Hegra, in North-Trondelag is the name of the place the writer comes from). Such greetings to local newspapers across the country were common until the 1980s. Then quit such letters coming. Today this part of our collective heritage is about to go into the book of oblivion - and the experiences, understanding and knowledge are practically washed out of our memory.
We have no exact figures on how many people who left Norway for the benefit of another existence, partly because it lacks accurate statistics of those who returned home. But a fairly reputable estimate is 900,000 - roughly within three generations. If we add the domestic migration during the same time period, from the inland to the coast and from south to north, strenghtens the image of a society in complete upheaval.
Why did almost one million Norwegians leave their motherland? The reasons were many - but we hardly come past that our ancestors carried with them different experiences than those that characterize our time.
In 2009 I wrote a comment that referred Norway’s change from emigrant to immigrant communities, and spent a few items from my own family history as an illustration:
"Three small coffins lowered into the soil. They contain the mortal remains of Torgeir (7), Torstein (4) and Peder (2). At the side of the tombs are 15 year old Ola and 41 year old John standing. They are big brother and dad. The mother of the three in the coffins, Guru, has no strength to follow their loved ones to the tomb. Who can blame her for that? For deaths are so incredibly tragic: The three give up life in the course of a few days. They died because of hunger. Spring was their only hope. But it did not come quickly enough. Death had gotten too good grip through hopeless winter months.
Everyone understands that we are not talking about May this year. We shall few years back. To 1773. It was a time of tremendous need in Norway and in the Nordic region.
We move by a few years, and writes 1851. But keep us in the same family. My family. On a remote Norwegian mountain farm - the same as the three children stayed at when the hunger took them - there is disruption. Absolute and final farewell. John Eriksen Tang Voll stands with his wife Mary and son Edward, between low, brown sunburned loghouses. The settlement stops here. From here one can walk for days eastward before meeting other people. And the one hit there, speak Swedish. "
Time span between the two parts of the story is not greater than that in 1851 still lived people from his childhood remembered hunger which affected parts of the 1770s. Through the first half of the 1800s the population in Norway grew rapidly - from 883,000 at the beginning of the century to 1.7 million 65 years later. For a people who essentially had to feed off what nature and the earth could give, this contributed to an increasing pressure that worried many. The idea of famine and starvation were still in the walls. From the mid-1800s was saeters in uplands (small mountain farms) inhabited crofts in steep, north-facing hillsides (often in the shadowside of the mountain) was cleared and farmed, farms in the lowlands and by the coast split up several times - all to create space for a rapidly growing population.
So: The first stories that there are opportunities elsewhere, in another world - begins to seep into Norwegian villages. Stories about a country that has "no owner", where anyone can claim land and create a whole new future, was like adventures for many norwegians. The stories must have had tremendous power in a society where thousands sought to the mountains to try to clear up some square meters so that they could make a minimum productive livelihood.
In our time it is immigration that is about to change society. Many attentions has unilaterally fixed against immigration from foreign climes - primarily the Middle East, parts of Asia and to some extent Africa, from which many are carriers of very different religious and cultural traditions than the majority common goods. There is an understandable attention in the sense that people from this part of the world differs visibly from the majority - but the greatest immigration to Norway comes from other European countries.
World dominant denomination, which in my childhood was a curiosity to be reckoned within our borders, today is the country's fastest growing church communities. While Norwegian churches are more or less empty Sunday after Sunday streams new neighbors in Catholic Masses - in the larger cities is the influx so large that priests must open the church door several times every Sunday until everyone has received his. In Norwegian towns are chapels which has hardly been used for decades been coveted assembly halls for Catholic believers from the Baltics and Poland.
At the small place Sistranda, located on the east side of the island of Frøya on the coast og South Trondelag, we find one of the oldest chapels - inaugurated in 1860, so to speak before emigration to America began. Haugean stood strong on the coast, then came China mission emissaries and more Free Church minded preachers. People flocked to gatherings and revival meetings. The power from the low-church, however, continues to show itself - also in Trondelag. For several years, the chapel has tempted a rather miserable existence. Before todays immigrants came. Today the old chapel has become a much used gathering place for European and Asian Catholics who work in the fishing industry. In this house of God alone we fathoms the whole story: Norwegian people trek from inland to the coast because of hunger, emigration to America - and today; immigration.
Lots of people in Norway today fret over immigrants who do not voluntarily allow assimilation. Should not people who come here take for our customs and become Norwegian - if not in skin so anyhow in mind, first as last?
We know that Norwegian Americans made a hedge about their heritage for generations. Most tried to continue language and culture to new generations. Sure they were American outside doorstep – but most Norwegian within, as long as it was possible to live that way.
Today, assimilation goes faster. Pressure against all minorities is strong, persistent and pervasive. Majority looks primarily on those few who are not integrated, which breaks the pattern - some to the extreme, as foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, or women who wear face-covering veils. The stories of families who send half big girls to "homeland" for genetalia destruction or forced marriage receive rightly attention - and arouses disgust. However, we hear little from The silent majority in the minority, - the once who make the food we eat at restaurants and washes buses we take to and from work, while their children fill colleges and universities - and are slowly but surely Westernized in mind and behavior. To the great sorrow for many first-time immigrants - who must see that children and especially grandchildren takes on customs they neither understand nor want their descendants to be a part of.
We do not know how Norway will look like in 50 years. Based on today's reality we can make statistical models and forward-writing these, but none of the projections that could have been done 50 years ago, would have been near to hit todays reality. Economic development, climate change, war and famine - all this will make more people move north in the world. A good portion of them will come here to Norway.
We tend to identify ourselves with "those who went to America." It is worse for them to us come today. But history is discouraging equal - with one exception; those who left Norway, was not fearing war and genocide. But as the first ones who went, they would get away from the fear of hunger and outright distress, this applies to a great deal that currently knocking on our door asking for protection. Many are sent back home.
However most immigrants come here because Norway offers economic opportunities they cannot find at home. Like Norwegian emigrants sent envelopes with dollars to parents and siblings in the old country, current migrant workers transmit money to their people back home in their old country. Like from the “Norwegian Americans”, the immigrants in Norway today send messages to relatives that they must come after. Women are taken from their home country for marriage.
Neither immigration nor emigration is unproblematic. There are indications that there is a limit to how many newcomers a society can absorb without creating problems. Problems that is difficult to solve.
For more than 150 years, Norway has been characterized by population displacements. Yet we struggle to find our role in a changing world. Maybe we can learn something from those who left? You may follow the tracks articles in Trønder-Avisa beyond this winter- www.t-a.no.
A little-noticed part of the Christmas story is a refugee story: Joseph and Mary fled with Jesus to Egypt to escape the genocide in their homeland. Borders were open to anyone who escaped Herod's madness - despite the fact that Egypt and Judea was within the same union, the Roman Empire. Tonight (Christmas night) we may dwell within this part of the story: "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in. "
The first Norwegian emigrants was moreover religious refugees. It is also part of the migration history.
Comment by
John Arne Moen
political editor in Trønder-Avisa
The comment written by John Arne Moen tells in a good way why half the population in Norway went to America between 1820 and 1920. And how we look upon immigration to Norway today.
Svein Helge Falstad
---
This is what John Arne Moen had on print december 24th 2014:
"And when the Christmas porridge is eaten and I look at the Christmas stars I will I on the Bridge of memories and revisited yearning look into old places at home." These words wrote Robert Jeremiah Norheim right before Christmas, after he as solitary 16-year-old emigrated from Kvam in North Trondelag to the US in 1894.
Robert is long dead, but the words he sent home to parents and siblings on the smallholding in the north of Steinkjer, gives him still life and soul.
Just before Christmas, Tronder-Avisa (The Tronder newspaper) launched "Uncle in America" - a mostly online article series that throughout the winter and spring to take us into the most comprehensive social upheaval in Norway after the Black Death: The emigration to America. The story gives reason for thought - when Norway has turned to such a degree, that we have become one of the world immigrant communities.
Emigration has "always" fascinated us. I am no exception. Ever since I was a child heard my father and his older brother talk about letters from America, who came all the way to grandmother died, in the first half of the 1970s - this part of the story remained in me. For three generations left about half of young herd motherland in favor of a better future "over there." They first who went left a remote, trackless mountain hamlet without any significant information about what awaited. They were pioneers in the world's most comprehensive, voluntary migration - which changed both "The old" and "The new" world. They subsequently solved ticket knew more - but for them the choice was essentially finally, in a way we today hardly can to put us into.
The Norwegian America and "those who went" was a part of our collective memory and understanding - until oil age struck the fjord. The First World War put an end to emigration wave, and when peace came after about four years, was much changed - and it all flattened out. Most of the last ones who left for America, left this world when we got to the 1980s - as did their surviving relatives here in Norway. Then the road to collective forgetfullness was short.
As a young local newspaper editor, I received just before Christmas in 1984 a letter from a fellow townsman emigrated in the 90s. Machine written - and inside was two - three images, including one of Hegra Church - in the middle of the prairie in Minnesota somewhere. (Hegra, in North-Trondelag is the name of the place the writer comes from). Such greetings to local newspapers across the country were common until the 1980s. Then quit such letters coming. Today this part of our collective heritage is about to go into the book of oblivion - and the experiences, understanding and knowledge are practically washed out of our memory.
We have no exact figures on how many people who left Norway for the benefit of another existence, partly because it lacks accurate statistics of those who returned home. But a fairly reputable estimate is 900,000 - roughly within three generations. If we add the domestic migration during the same time period, from the inland to the coast and from south to north, strenghtens the image of a society in complete upheaval.
Why did almost one million Norwegians leave their motherland? The reasons were many - but we hardly come past that our ancestors carried with them different experiences than those that characterize our time.
In 2009 I wrote a comment that referred Norway’s change from emigrant to immigrant communities, and spent a few items from my own family history as an illustration:
"Three small coffins lowered into the soil. They contain the mortal remains of Torgeir (7), Torstein (4) and Peder (2). At the side of the tombs are 15 year old Ola and 41 year old John standing. They are big brother and dad. The mother of the three in the coffins, Guru, has no strength to follow their loved ones to the tomb. Who can blame her for that? For deaths are so incredibly tragic: The three give up life in the course of a few days. They died because of hunger. Spring was their only hope. But it did not come quickly enough. Death had gotten too good grip through hopeless winter months.
Everyone understands that we are not talking about May this year. We shall few years back. To 1773. It was a time of tremendous need in Norway and in the Nordic region.
We move by a few years, and writes 1851. But keep us in the same family. My family. On a remote Norwegian mountain farm - the same as the three children stayed at when the hunger took them - there is disruption. Absolute and final farewell. John Eriksen Tang Voll stands with his wife Mary and son Edward, between low, brown sunburned loghouses. The settlement stops here. From here one can walk for days eastward before meeting other people. And the one hit there, speak Swedish. "
Time span between the two parts of the story is not greater than that in 1851 still lived people from his childhood remembered hunger which affected parts of the 1770s. Through the first half of the 1800s the population in Norway grew rapidly - from 883,000 at the beginning of the century to 1.7 million 65 years later. For a people who essentially had to feed off what nature and the earth could give, this contributed to an increasing pressure that worried many. The idea of famine and starvation were still in the walls. From the mid-1800s was saeters in uplands (small mountain farms) inhabited crofts in steep, north-facing hillsides (often in the shadowside of the mountain) was cleared and farmed, farms in the lowlands and by the coast split up several times - all to create space for a rapidly growing population.
So: The first stories that there are opportunities elsewhere, in another world - begins to seep into Norwegian villages. Stories about a country that has "no owner", where anyone can claim land and create a whole new future, was like adventures for many norwegians. The stories must have had tremendous power in a society where thousands sought to the mountains to try to clear up some square meters so that they could make a minimum productive livelihood.
In our time it is immigration that is about to change society. Many attentions has unilaterally fixed against immigration from foreign climes - primarily the Middle East, parts of Asia and to some extent Africa, from which many are carriers of very different religious and cultural traditions than the majority common goods. There is an understandable attention in the sense that people from this part of the world differs visibly from the majority - but the greatest immigration to Norway comes from other European countries.
World dominant denomination, which in my childhood was a curiosity to be reckoned within our borders, today is the country's fastest growing church communities. While Norwegian churches are more or less empty Sunday after Sunday streams new neighbors in Catholic Masses - in the larger cities is the influx so large that priests must open the church door several times every Sunday until everyone has received his. In Norwegian towns are chapels which has hardly been used for decades been coveted assembly halls for Catholic believers from the Baltics and Poland.
At the small place Sistranda, located on the east side of the island of Frøya on the coast og South Trondelag, we find one of the oldest chapels - inaugurated in 1860, so to speak before emigration to America began. Haugean stood strong on the coast, then came China mission emissaries and more Free Church minded preachers. People flocked to gatherings and revival meetings. The power from the low-church, however, continues to show itself - also in Trondelag. For several years, the chapel has tempted a rather miserable existence. Before todays immigrants came. Today the old chapel has become a much used gathering place for European and Asian Catholics who work in the fishing industry. In this house of God alone we fathoms the whole story: Norwegian people trek from inland to the coast because of hunger, emigration to America - and today; immigration.
Lots of people in Norway today fret over immigrants who do not voluntarily allow assimilation. Should not people who come here take for our customs and become Norwegian - if not in skin so anyhow in mind, first as last?
We know that Norwegian Americans made a hedge about their heritage for generations. Most tried to continue language and culture to new generations. Sure they were American outside doorstep – but most Norwegian within, as long as it was possible to live that way.
Today, assimilation goes faster. Pressure against all minorities is strong, persistent and pervasive. Majority looks primarily on those few who are not integrated, which breaks the pattern - some to the extreme, as foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, or women who wear face-covering veils. The stories of families who send half big girls to "homeland" for genetalia destruction or forced marriage receive rightly attention - and arouses disgust. However, we hear little from The silent majority in the minority, - the once who make the food we eat at restaurants and washes buses we take to and from work, while their children fill colleges and universities - and are slowly but surely Westernized in mind and behavior. To the great sorrow for many first-time immigrants - who must see that children and especially grandchildren takes on customs they neither understand nor want their descendants to be a part of.
We do not know how Norway will look like in 50 years. Based on today's reality we can make statistical models and forward-writing these, but none of the projections that could have been done 50 years ago, would have been near to hit todays reality. Economic development, climate change, war and famine - all this will make more people move north in the world. A good portion of them will come here to Norway.
We tend to identify ourselves with "those who went to America." It is worse for them to us come today. But history is discouraging equal - with one exception; those who left Norway, was not fearing war and genocide. But as the first ones who went, they would get away from the fear of hunger and outright distress, this applies to a great deal that currently knocking on our door asking for protection. Many are sent back home.
However most immigrants come here because Norway offers economic opportunities they cannot find at home. Like Norwegian emigrants sent envelopes with dollars to parents and siblings in the old country, current migrant workers transmit money to their people back home in their old country. Like from the “Norwegian Americans”, the immigrants in Norway today send messages to relatives that they must come after. Women are taken from their home country for marriage.
Neither immigration nor emigration is unproblematic. There are indications that there is a limit to how many newcomers a society can absorb without creating problems. Problems that is difficult to solve.
For more than 150 years, Norway has been characterized by population displacements. Yet we struggle to find our role in a changing world. Maybe we can learn something from those who left? You may follow the tracks articles in Trønder-Avisa beyond this winter- www.t-a.no.
A little-noticed part of the Christmas story is a refugee story: Joseph and Mary fled with Jesus to Egypt to escape the genocide in their homeland. Borders were open to anyone who escaped Herod's madness - despite the fact that Egypt and Judea was within the same union, the Roman Empire. Tonight (Christmas night) we may dwell within this part of the story: "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in. "
The first Norwegian emigrants was moreover religious refugees. It is also part of the migration history.
Comment by
John Arne Moen
political editor in Trønder-Avisa
Emigration from West coast of Norway.
This is the comment in Trønder-Avisa desember 24th 2014
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