Italian scientific migration to the United States of America after 1938 racial laws

Abstract

This paper analyzes Italian scientific migration to the United States, following the introduction of the Fascist regime’s anti-Semitic laws in 1938. While German, British and American historiography has devoted considerable attention to the issue of 1930s scientific migration to the US, scholars have mostly overlooked the Italian case. Drawing on individual biographies, institutional histories, and theoretical contributions, the paper provides a new analytic approach on the scientific migration from Italy. Using various sources, especially the records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, deposited at New York Public Library this paper challenges the idea that Italian scientific wave to the United States can be considered not just as an exile or an escape, as the Italian historians use to do, because it present certain traits typical of migrations. The placement of scholars, for example, took place through a series of migration networks, which are analyzed as well as the integration/assimilation process.