Fascist and Anti-Fascist Propaganda in America: The Dispatches o ...

Chapter 1

Italy from the American Immigration Quota Act of 1921 to Mussolini’s Policy of Grossraum, 1921–1924

With few exceptions, American scholars view the phenomenon of immigration through the lens of U.S. socioeconomic development. “As Americans,” E. Schuyler points out, “we have only a platonic interest in the amount of emigration from Italy, the causes which produce it and the real or probable effects on the prosperity of that country.”¹ It seems, however, that historians have neither analyzed sufficiently the motivation behind this attitude nor considered the international repercussions of 1920s U.S. anti-immigration legislation, particularly on the domestic consequences suffered by Italy.