Impact on WW1 stopping Immigration from Germany

trajen777

Banned
From 1820 on German and Austrian Immigration to the USA was

Germany -- 6,021,951
Austria --- 2,534,617

Add to this another 100,000 going to South America. Now this is not counting the children born in country.

Anyway if Germany had been able to keep those people (many left after the rev of 1848) what impact would this have had for WWI. Add another 800,000 - 1,000,000 troops x 3 from birth rate = 2.4 / 3 mm additional.

Positive - greater productivity - more troops (think from 8 armies to 12 - 14 at start of the war)
Negative - greater burden on food resources (however you would have had many more farmers to produce the crops that went unplanted for lack of workers (fertilizer is an issue -- however creative solutions are available - Night Soil anyone)
 
Wages in the US were higher than in Germany throughout this period. Emigration from Germany decreased in the last third of the 19c, as German wages rose and Bismarck instituted income support for the poor.

Also, your calculation for the extra number of troops involves two wrong numbers:

1. You're multiplying the number of emigrants by three. You shouldn't. Germany's population increased by a factor of just under 2 from 1850 to 1914, and if it had had the population pressure caused by having all those people stay in the country, then surely the growth rate would have been lower. Austria grew even more slowly, around 70% not counting Hungary. The US had much higher population growth because it was (and still is) underpopulated relative to its agricultural output, so land was basically free, promoting high birth rates.

2. Germany already had 13 million troops in the field, and Austria-Hungary another 8 million. There is no way you're turning 8 armies into 14 out of the number of troops you think Germany would've had extra if their grandparents hadn't emigrated to the US.
 
Positive - greater productivity - more troops (think from 8 armies to 12 - 14 at start of the war)

The limiting factor for the German Army at the dawn of WWI was not population ... it was a mixture of funding problems (the Navy got a lot more than they should've realistically) and the officer corps being largely closed so as not to compromise the corps' fundamentally aristocratic, Prussian nature.

The German Empire could've had a larger army at the start of the war. They ultimately chose not to.

The same thing applies to Austria-Hungary, although in their case it's the matter of messy internal politics that didn't see army funding go up as everyone else geared up for war.
 
Wages in the US were higher than in Germany throughout this period. Emigration from Germany decreased in the last third of the 19c, as German wages rose and Bismarck instituted income support for the poor.

Also, your calculation for the extra number of troops involves two wrong numbers:

1. You're multiplying the number of emigrants by three. You shouldn't. Germany's population increased by a factor of just under 2 from 1850 to 1914, and if it had had the population pressure caused by having all those people stay in the country, then surely the growth rate would have been lower. Austria grew even more slowly, around 70% not counting Hungary. The US had much higher population growth because it was (and still is) underpopulated relative to its agricultural output, so land was basically free, promoting high birth rates.

I don't think that is necessarily how it would play out. 'Population pressure' is a multifaceted issue (depressing wages, increasing prices, etc), but Germany today clearly has found ways to incorporate 80 million+ citizens. Land is not so much of a factor in increasingly urbanised Europe, so to make it work you would need government policies to set minimum wages, and urban planning to accomodate the greater number of people, but it can be done. Essentially Germany could keep most or all of those emigrants and maintain their natural birth rate in the period, effectively giving them a much higher population in 1914.

An interesting alternative is whether those emigrants going to a German colony would have led to a settler dominion a long the lines of the British Empire?
 
Top