What percentage of 19th Century Irish went back and forth to Ireland on the "coffin ships?" If you are telling me that 1/3 did, you are smoking crack. They held wakes for the Irish leaving for America, because they were never going to be seen by their families again.
Don't YOU try to rewrite history.
Again, my point is not to demean any group, but simply to point out that the current immigrant waves are not completely alien and different from all waves before -- some are, some aren't -- the previous waves had some good and some bad, and we dealt with it by various laws, just as we are debating about now.
Excerpt on return immigration:
You Can Go Home Again: Immigrants Who Went Back
By Donna Przecha
I thought like the author that immigration was a one way trip. But, 61% of the Southern Italians returned home.,and 37.8% of Northern Italians .
May 10, 2001 - - Perhaps I am naive, but I always thought the immigration story ended with a person coming to the United States and never returning.
Who Left and Who Stayed? Statistics by nationality are quite striking. According to a report in 1908 comparing the departures in 1908 with the arrivals of 1907, 61% of the Southern Italians returned home. Croatians and Slovenians (59.8%), Slovaks (56.1%) and Hungarians (48.7%) also had high return rates. The lowest rate, 5.1%, belonged to the Jews (categorized as "Hebrews"). This is understandable since they fled the pogroms to save their lives and had nowhere to return.
Surprisingly, when you think of all the nostalgic songs about their homeland, the Irish rarely went back — only 6.3%. Others with a low return rate were Czechs (7.8%), English (10.4%) and Scandinavians (10.9%). In the middle range were Germans (15.5%), Serbs and Bulgarians (21.9%), Finns (23.3%), Poles (33.9%) and Northern Italians (37.8%). Interestingly enough, the Irish and the Swedish were also groups with a very high percentage of woman immigrants.
Women had less incentive to return because they usually enjoyed greater freedom in America than they did at home. For example, in most countries, an unmarried woman — even one independent enough to travel alone to America, get a job and send money back home — was expected to live in her father's house until she married. Also, many decided that the working conditions were more favorable in America than they were at home. Swedish and Irish women, for instance, often went into domestic service (an occupation available only to single women). They often found that they were much more comfortable living as a servant in a wealthy home than they would be living on a family farm where they performed backbreaking work from dawn to dusk.
Immigrants who returned to their native countries after arriving in America often did so temporarily (like my grandparents did) but others returned home to live permanently. Historians, genealogists and government officials are generally more interested in those coming to the U.S. than those leaving, so information on return immigration is hard to find. And, since the US didn't start keeping records on departing passengers until 1908, there are not a lot of reliable statistics. Even those official numbers are less than accurate because they often indicate only that a person is leaving the US without mentioning whether the departure is permanent or just for a visit home. They also don't indicate if the trip is the first arrival/departure to/from the US or if the traveler made multiple trips.
This lack of detailed record-keeping has the potential to throw your research off-track if you aren't careful. For example, someone who permanently immigrated to America but made four trips home would show up in immigration records five times. On the other hand, return migration also has the potential to help you solve some mysteries. Sometimes you'll find an ancestor listed in records for a ship passage that doesn't fit with previous research. Keep in mind that this may simply be record of a second passage to America. A young man, for example, may have come to America alone the first time, then returned home to marry, and then entered the US a second time with his bride to settle down.
Who Returned? As many as one in three American immigrants may have returned to their home country either for a visit or to live there permanently.
We have more statistics relating to the huge migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although statistics on departing passengers were not kept until 1908, figures that have been developed by scholars reveal some interesting patterns. Several believe that, overall, as many as one in three American immigrants returned to their home country. In some years there was one departure for every two arrivals. (However, as stated above this does not mean the person was leaving permanently or that he had not made other trips.) During the depression of the 1930s there were actually more people leaving the US than entering.