Stowaways at Bohemia's Shores: Undocumented Emigration and People-Smuggling Networks in Interwar East Central Europe

Abstract

AbstractThis article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.