Suposedly say the CSA won their independence... how much immigrants from Europe can they attract. Will it be limited to Protestants only?
Didn't most of those countries abolish slavery long before the ACW?Honestly I gave argued before, people should look at Latin America as example. As long as CSA are as thinly populated as it is, it will see European immigration.
Didn't most of those countries abolish slavery long before the ACW?
I don't think the Dutch got around to it until 1863, and the issue of slavery didn't stop about 30,000 Germans from immigrating to Brazil from 1856 to 1883 (not to mention many more Portuguese and Italians).
America was popular to emigrants for two things. One, the idea of vast empty plains with land for free and the huge bustling cities bursting with jobs. While neither of these were exactly true, the idea of them held many imaginations in Europe. The CSA will have neither.
The Confederacy was a very right wing society, and that is even for its time.Southerners before 1860 were not terribly friendly to immigration. I do not simply refer to mass nativist movements, although Know Nothingism briefly flourished in the South as well as the North. I have in mind the feelings of many Southerners who did not belong to any nativist movement, like Edmund Ruffin: "One of the great benefits of the institution of African slavery to the southern states is its effect in keeping away from our territory, and directing to the north and north-west, the hordes of immigrants now flowing from Europe, and which accession of population has already so much demoralized not only the states receiving the largest supplies of such population, but the federal government itself. Every political aspirant, aiming for the highest offices, deems it to his interest to conciliate and attempt to bribe to his support, this new and enormous element of political power. Hence we see unprincipled, but not the less influential and dangerous aspirants for presidential honors, competing with each other, as to who shall offer the highest bids for this support, in bestowing the public lands gratuitously on immigrants from all the world. It will not be long before this foreign power, so fostered and increased, will be so strong, that the grants, conditions, or acquiescence of the government, will be altogether superfluous and worthless." (Ruffin acknowledged that "To hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe our country has been greatly indebted for their useful private or public lives." but added "But I speak of classes, and not of individuals--of the general rule, and not of its exceptions.") https://books.google.com/books?id=nWNKAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA64-IA15
To be sure, there were some dissenters. As Eugene Genovese writes in The Political Economy of Slavery, "J. L. Orr, an advocate of industrial expansion, chose consistency over safety and advocated liberal naturalization procedures in the Confederacy, praising foreign mechanics as 'everywhere useful citizens.' Not many Orrs were to be found in the slave states. The foreign-born population of the Southern cities continued to cause apprehension among the rural slaveholders. With only 20 per cent of Charleston’s population foreign-born in 1848, foreigners led natives by almost two to one in the race for poorhouse admission. Elsewhere, except in New Orleans, conditions were about the same: unskilled Irish workers struggling to stay alive, Jewish peddlers and small merchants doing a necessary job but arousing considerable resentment by their mode of life, German artisans falling under the suspicion of antislavery feelings, and so forth." https://books.google.com/books?id=ld_bAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA232
In general, I think Ruffin's view was more prevalent--that slavery discouraged immigration to the South was considered a feature, not a bug. If even in the North it was feared that immigrants would bring foreign "isms," this fear had to be more intense in the South.