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1History of Immigration in Post-Independence Texas
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31 Republican Era
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51.1 The Whig Years
6Texian independence was marked by a sudden rush of Anglo-American homesteaders, many of them with their Afro-American slaves. Seeking their fortunes on the newly-opened plains and in the almost comically settler-friendly political economy, the dark soil of East Texas became home to a vast belt of plantations, while many freeholders spread out onto the prairie and into the Hill Country. The former came largely from the South, with the coastal southeast gaining a distinctly Cajun French population; the latter was a heady mix of Southerners, doughface Northerners, and a small population of isolated anti-slavery Northerners.
7They were not alone. The new German population also tended to be abolitionist, though many of them held their tongues in order to work with Texians and recent Anglo-American immigrants. They arrived in several distinct populations - first a small group from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, who moved to what would later become Weimar County in the 1830s, then a larger and more varied group led by the Mainzer Adelsverein, who moved both to Weimar and to a region of the Hill Country sometimes called the "Dutch Triangle", with points at Austin, Bexar, and Konscho (OTL San Angelo); this group, which had its unofficial capital at Fredericksburg and was led by Hans von Meusebach for a time, ran the gamut from utopian socialists to fairly non-ideological peasant farmers.
8Immigration to Texas dramatically ramped up in the late 1840s due to three major events. The first was the Springtime of Nations, which led many settlers, primarily German, to flee to Texas, both to escape the fighting and to escape repression for their radical beliefs. They were far from the only ones: Czechs in the Brazos Valley, Wends in the Serbin area, Swiss in the northern plains, Roma on the edge of the Hill Country, and religious minorities such as Raskolniki, Ashkenazi Jews, and Hutterites all moved to Texas.
9But European religions were not the only ones facing repression. After the murder of Joseph Smith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints underwent a crisis of leadership. The majority of their followers, led by Brigham Young, moved to a wide area straddling the borders of Texas, Mexico, and the United States, including the stake of Alma along the Alma River (OTL Rio Chama). While the Mormons were never a majority even among Anglo settlers in the Far West, their combination of prosperous self-sufficiency, long-standing cross-border ties, and cultural focus on practical desert matters like irrigation meant that they would always have a significant presence and impact.
10Another often-repressed group came over in the wake of tragedy. The Great Dying, a potato blight that led to famine across Ireland, came just as nativist movements swept the United States. The 1848 election, decided as it was by the House of Representatives, saw a Democrat President in William R. King supported by a Native American Party that demanded harsh immigration restrictions, and municipal governments across the North that carried out everything from deliberate regulatory inconveniences to anti-Catholic near-pogroms against the Irish. Many of them, getting the message, went south - either to majority-Catholic but non-Anglophone Mexico or to majority-Protestant but functionally pluralist and half-Anglophone Texas. They mostly settled along the Gulf Coast, from Beaumont and Houston all the way to Refugio (soon pronounced "r'feery-o") and Corpus Christi.
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121.2 The Hybrid State
13As the lowercase-d democratic era of Texas politics came to a close - as the government became more and more clientelist and dominated by cotton and cattle interests, as corruption swept the stage and elections ceased to be meaningfully contested - migration, coincidentally, plateaued. The "push factors" of foreign crisis and famine began to draw down (the dissolution of the United States ultimately provoked relatively little migration), and while relatively few migrants went back to their home countries, immigration became in some ways less of a factor than internal migration.
14Between the rise of the "Capitol Hotel Cabal", usually dated to the election of Gazaway Bugg Lamar in 1850, and the "Positivist Coup" of 1874, there were two major countervailing impulses in Texian internal migration. Economic elites wanted more people in the cities, in order to foster industrialization, allow for more shipping of cash crops and beef from larger ports (and, in the case of the latter, in the form of canned meat less likely to spoil on ship journeys to customers, perhaps as far afield as Europe), and create more national prestige. However, there was also a desire to push the Indians further and further to the frontiers, opening up more land for white settlers.
15This was made more difficult by the fact that Indians were moving into Texas. The internal politics of the Sequoyah Territory are beyond the space of this monograph to explain, but as a result of developments in the early 1850s, Cherokee farmers - many of them fairly affluent and assimilated into Anglo-American society, and a number of them slaveowners - began crossing the Red River to settle in what would later be known as the Panola Crescent. While many Texians opposed the influx of well-heeled "savages" buying up and speculating on land, the Texian government itself saw them as a useful example of "good Indians" - indeed, movements to amend the Texian Constitution to allow them to become citizens were openly mooted, though such measures never came to fruition.
16Still, the attempts to promote a Westernized society of yeoman farmers on individual plots of land were sometimes frustrated by their use of immigrant pioneers. In some areas of the "frontier", immigrant communities established their own peasant communes using the legal precedent of the ejidos: Jewish traditionalist kibbutzim that sought to create self-sufficient communities isolated from gentile cultural practices and the fear of pogroms, Russian obshchiny established by dirt-poor former serfs in order to make the most of scarce resources, and a wide variety of intentional communities from Owenite socialists to Hutterites opposed to individual ownership of goods, from fresh-off-the-boat immigrants from Germany to crowds of urban poor from the tenements of Galveston, Houston, and Bexar caught in the throes of the Third Great Awakening.
17It's worth noting, however, that while such farmers made up a substantial minority, they were only ever a minority. The Dutch Triangle definitely had the odd intentional community like Bettina, but it was mostly made up of farmers from the west and north of Germany with no particular ideological alignment, not much more organized than Anglo-American farmers. German settlement ranged all over the former Comancheria, but the main thrust of it stretched north and west in a roughly straight line towards Arcadia (OTL Odessa) and Marienfeld, providing a sort of buffer between the Anglo farmers the government sought to promote and the Hispanic farmers the government didn't really know what to do with.
18Those same farmers were increasingly pressured by cycles of debt, mechanization decreasing the demand for agricultural labor, the Hill Country proving to be worse farmland than hoped for, and the rising cost of land in the "Anglo-Texian heartland". Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Germanophone Texians flocked to industrial cities, from coastal cities like Indianola and Galveston to inland cities like San Antonio, Fredericksburg, and Austin to cities "in between" like Houston-Harrisburgh. Though segregation by language was never an official policy, Kleindeutschlands popped up in places like the West Side of Houston and (with a distinctly Alsatian flavor) along Fredericksburg Road in San Antonio, and conversely Anglo neighborhoods (in actual fact, plurality- or majority-Irish, but records often failed to note the difference) developed in the Westlandsee area of reclaimed bayou in Indianola. Industrial suburbs like Greensburgh outside Houston and Castine near Beaumont also developed, especially in coastal cities; they tended to be more culturally mixed than their attached cities, but their residents tended to be more transient, most of them returning to their usually-rural hometowns every year for Christmas and New Years'. Consequently, such towns drew their populations mostly from nearby regions - for example, the industrial suburbs of the Jefferson County Metropolis took on a distinctly Cajun French flavor, as both Texas Cajuns and Louisianan migrants flocked to them every year.
19Industrialization and the expansion of farming to the western prairies also affected slavery. Cotton remained a major export, particularly in the East, but it was no longer "king" - the growth of beef and the industrial sector and the expansion of cotton production in the British Empire meant that the industry represented a sharply-decreasing portion of the Texian economy. The industry still had an outsized impact on the economic elites that led Texas - while they invested their capital in all sorts of industries, most of them originally got that capital from the cotton industry, and they still maintained plantations and import-export businesses from their Houston mansions. Texian anti-manumission laws remained in force, but in practice a number of free Afro-Texians (either runaways or especially daring northern migrants) lived in isolated communities of the far north or west, though this was usually only transient - most people escaping slavery in Texas made a beeline for either Mexico or the Northern States.
20Another factor in migration came from across the Rio Grande. The victory of conservative forces against liberals like Benito Juarez led to both liberal Mexican intellectuals and job-seeking Mexican migrants lighting out for Texas. Their relative success, aided by proximity to Texian capital and American markets, led to more and more migration, concentrated between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande. Many migrants went even further, to agricultural communities in the Llano Estacado or industrial suburbs on the Gulf Coast.
21With them came the first migrants from even farther than Europe. The "Crisis of the Late Ansei", a wide-ranging period of socio-economic and political disruption in Nippon caused by its forcible opening-up and power struggles between various government factions, led many Nipponese to head overseas. Though most of them went to Hawaii, the Russian Far East, or British Malaya, a number of them went to Mexico. Conservative Mexican governments institutionally hostile to Asians prompted them to move further, and many of them went to Texas, starting rice farms in places like Ocazaqui (OTL Mykawa) and Útxida (OTL near Sugar Land).
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231.3 The Reformist Era
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251.3.1 "Blackite" Reform
26The Texian government before the "Positivist Coup", which many historians now regard as an unnecessarily charged term of early Imperial historiography for a set of fairly ordinary government actions, represented a fundamental shift in Texian elite attitudes towards governing. Before the election of John Philip Black, the 32-year-old hero of the Third Texian-Mexican War, as President, the leading current in the Texian government was a populist-flavored agenda that could be boiled down to one sentence: "The business of Texas is business." Black and his Reform Party (unofficial, though changing Texian national elections to American-style partisan forms was one of the first tasks of the Black administration) had a wide variety of definite ideas on very specific issues. Immigration was only one of them.
27Black, who had matriculated at Princeton and Oxford, was influenced by both European colonialism and emerging theories of scientific racism. His campaign manifesto, one of the first political campaign manifestos in Texian history (very probably the first not written by a socialist), cited Robert Knox's The Races of Man and Anthony Clement's Heredity and Nations. Black believed that Texas had to put controls on its immigration policy, both to ensure that high-quality immigrants came to Texas and to keep low-quality immigrants out. This meant both creating distinctions within groups (Black believed in "keeping out both the dissolute poor and the indolent rich") and between them (turning away migrants from Southern Europe and Latin America while trying to recruit migrants from northern Europe).
28Even despite the rise of positivist politics, there were still limits on what the Texian government could do about migration. Citizenship was under their control, but that only meant that a wide variety of non-citizen migrants made their way into the country. In part this had to do, like previous waves of migration, with international matters; most notably, the rise of the Russian Empire both at home and abroad. Tsar Alexander III, elevated to the tsardom as a twelve-year-old by a palace coup against the previous tsar by conservative boyars, had led a campaign of both industrialization and expansion on the "Russian model", seeking to avoid Westernizing society while making Russia strong enough to stand up to the West. From a Texian standpoint, this meant that a steady stream of dissidents from within Russia and refugees from pogroms and nationalist wars on the imperial western frontier were lighting out for the West, and a good number of them were going to Texas.
29Unlike the first wave of migrants, new migrants were often able to make use of kith and kin ties to their adopted country, and were often able to settle in communities that already had members of their groups. Jewish refugees flocked to existing Jewish neighborhoods in the cities and farming communities on the plains; Russians unhappy with the new government were able to make their way to Russian communities; Volga Germans and Germans on the Prussian frontier were able to move to existing German communities. This was not true of all migrants, with perhaps the most notable exception being Caucasians (primarily Georgians and Armenians), but even for them the precedent that past groups had set meant that they had a smoother way than they might have otherwise.
30As Texian immigration got political, Texian immigrants became more and more of a factor in politics at home and abroad. This did not mean that they made up a united front; Irish-Texians, for example, were divided between the Texian Section of the Workers' International, the left-wing nationalist Sinn Féin Brotherhood in Texas, the more moderate leftist Irish Labor Alliance, and the Church-aligned conservative St. Patrick League for Solidarity, which clashed, often physically. Political groups in Texas were divided based on class, urbanity, ideology, and often between the camps of strong personalities, as with the Latter-Day Saints, who were divided between the Republican League of Abram R. Snow, the Theodemocratic Society of Benjamin Howell, and the Nauvoo Legion of Arthur Kimball; groups which had relatively small differences in public platform, but whose leaders polarized the Latter-Day Saints between them on the secular political level even as they remained more united in other spheres.
31Immigrant groups were also often divided on the politics of their home countries. The Ukrainian-Texian population became a prime example of that; Ukrainian "Greens", "Reds", "Blues", "Purples", and "Whites" (roughly speaking, agrarianists, socialists, liberal nationalists, clericalists, and anti-nationalist liberals, respectively) all organized in Texas - not to achieve goals within the Texian system, but to raise funds and acquire resources for groups seeking to do so in Ukraine. Though legal restrictions like the Ramirez Anti-Intervention Act aimed at preventing foreign political outcomes from being fought for on Texian soil, they only succeeded in driving such contestation underground.
32Despite the fact that modern historiography talks a lot about European immigration, though, the vast majority of new Texians in this period came from nearer nations: the former United States (including the reconstituted Second United States, formed by the Cincinnati Convention just two years into Black's first administration) and Mexico. Many of the Mexican migrants were considered Anglos, or otherwise separate from the rest of the Mexicans; in addition to Latter-Day Saints and other Anglophone settlers in Northern Mexico (particularly California), there were a number of Russian settlers from Alta California. East Asians came to Texas by way of Mexico, as well: more Nipponese to the rural southeast, but also Chinese and Chosonese seeking their fortunes and Tonkinese fleeing Chinese occupation.
33But by far the largest group of Mexican migrants were Spanish-speaking ethnic mestizos looking for economic opportunity in Texas. Mexican migration into Texas came in a distinct chain - first to border regions like Rio Grande City and El Paso, then further from the border to small towns in majority-Hispanophone regions, then to Hispanophone neighborhoods in large mixed cities such as Houston and Bexar, which by this point was less than a quarter Anglophone. The Mexican diaspora in Texas was mixed by class and ethnicity, and indeed had almost identical demographics to the northern Mexican states whence its members came, but higher and lower social strata went to geographically different places than the majority: higher-class criollos often went directly to cities, particularly San Antonio, where they could buy and manage land from afar, while poorer mestizos, indios, and Afro-Mexicans largely settled in the Far West.
34As for American migrants, they can be roughly divided into two groups: Southerners and Midwesterners. The former were mostly smallholders pushed out of the Conference of American States by a slavery-based economy premised on constant growth but limited in capacity. While Blackite Reformists held quite a bit of contempt for governments they saw as shortsighted and economic models they saw as inherently unsustainable, and the migration laws set up often actively discriminated against Southerners, especially poor Southerners, the Republic of Texas had long been considered a sort of honorary Southern state. East Texas and its neighboring states had similar cultures and economic systems: more to the point, there were many family ties between the two. There was also plenty of work to be done in the new papermills, railyards, shipyards, and textile factories of the Southeast, and the new Texian capitalist class was all too willing to hire free white Anglophones on the cheap in places where the risk of rebellion was too high to use slaves.
35While Southerners were discouraged but had reason to migrate despite the discouragement, Midwesterners were encouraged but to some degree needed the encouragement. This was not because of any lack of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs in the Midwest. The farmer-friendly inflation regime that prevailed after the end of the United States was abating, and as the dust cleared it was becoming increasingly clear that bankers, both in Eastern cities and the Midwest itself, owned the show. But Midwestern farmers were tenacious enough to want to stick it out regardless (indeed, the rise of the People's Alliance meant that political-economic forces could be bent to the farmers' will, at least to an extent), and even those who wanted to leave could migrate within the United States, or go to Canada, rather than go to Texas. Still, a not insignificant number of them did go to Texas, especially from border regions of East and West Kansas. Others migrated south to build rail links between ranches and farms in the Midwest and Texian ports, and while a number of them went back to build railways north of the border, a number of them stayed and settled in railway towns such as Katy (OTL near Amarillo).
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371.3.2 The Directorate
38By Black's third term as President, which begun with his election in 1886, his brand of "reform" was on his last legs. His less popular ideas, such as local government reform and creating a "new Zion" in the Llano Estacado, were beginning to drag the Reformists down with him, and the old "interests" that he had deemed "corrosive to Texian democracy" were beginning to reassert themselves. The turning point came when, due to a combination of international pressure, the political goal of promoting free labor over "aristocratic capitalism", and a desire to destroy the power of a cotton industry opposed to the "Blackites", President Black and his remaining allies in the Texian legislatures attempted to ban slavery. When the bill in question seemed doomed, Black used the power of the state to detain certain opposition Representatives and blackmail others. In response, a cabal led by General George Richards forced President Black to resign and former Vice President Jeremiah Clinton to preside over an effective military junta for the remainder of his term. That junta would continue under a series of Presidents remarkable only for their unquestioning servility until the very end of the Republic of Texas.
39If the pre-Black consensus on immigration could be summed up in a sentence, the post-Black consensus could be summed up in a word: "No." The new government saw immigrants as potential threats to the stability of the state due both to concerns over "dual loyalties" and over the rise of nativist sentiment creating a breakdown in public order, as had happened several times in Northern cities. The former risk was considered substantiated by the rise of organizations like the Deutsche Bund, the Jewish Federation of Labor, and the United Fionn MacCumhaill Brotherhood as locuses of everything from civil disobedience to active low-level partisan warfare.
40The "Directorate" conducted some low-level harassment and wide-ranging surveillance of immigrant communities, but it had enough peasant cunning to refrain from active repression that might provoke higher-level resistance, or from encouraging nativist sentiments that might spiral out of control. As such, the Texian government tried to keep Texian demography in a state of artificial stability. Such an aim was undermined somewhat by the force of the business interests that backed the new regime and wished to expand in order to export to foreign markets.
41In another world, such divisions within the regime could have had substantial outcomes. They were interrupted, however, by the dawn of the Texian empire. The war economy led to the decisive victory of the status quo - the regime, after all, had bigger problems to deal with.