‘I’ll Bring You Over Too’: Poverty, Emigration, and Hungarian Encounters with America in the 1920s

‘I’ll Bring You Over Too’: Poverty, Emigration, and Hungarian Encounters with America in the 1920s

One response to poverty was ‘going to America’ (‘amerikázás’), that is, emigrating overseas. In 1921, six thousand Hungarians emigrated across the ocean, and during the first half of the 1920s nearly 20,000 in total. This was by no means a low number: in that year the number of Hungarian emigrants exceeded the Austrian, French, and even Romanian figures. It is worth adding that, from earlier waves of emigration, there already existed Hungarian d…