At the moment I only have access to one secondary source, as I need to get the rest scanned and sent in an email so I can access them at any time. The source I read was called Impossible Subjects  written by Mae M. Nagai which covers the immigration process from 1924 to 1965. While this book is not specifically about the Finnish it does serve as a resource for immigration history in the 20th century. Nagai discusses how a new closed policy of immigration was formed due to the new quota system, and the Johnson Reed Act of 1924. This new system of closed immigration was so vastly different from the open immigration policy that the United States had prior to the 1920’s, in fact according to Ngai, “Before the 1920’s immigration into the United States was numerically unrestricted…” (p. 18). Finland for example was now only allowed to have 569 people enter the United States in 1929 versus the the 65,721 allowed in from Great Britain and Northern Ireland (p. 28). The U.S was intentionally restricting Finnish migration and immigration to almost zero,  but tens of thousands were still allowed in from Great Britain. This means that the Finns migration into the U.S, and more specifically into New Hampshire, from Finland ended for a period, and provides an end date for my project with Kerrin.

What I plan on using this book for is seeing if a link can be established from the two letters written to and about Jacob Raitto and how immigration policy was forming at that time. The letters were written in 1918 and discusses trying to obtain a bank loan but Mr. Raitto cannot get a bank loan because he is not a naturalized U.S citizen. At the moment it is not clear what happens to Mr. Raitto next however, I will attempt to find out what happened to Mr. Raitto and if there are any further documents about him in the Chesire Historical Society.  This might establish what happened to one of the Finns in the Keene, New Hampshire area, and what happened to the rest of the Finns who  lived and possibly who still lives in the region to this day.

 

 

 

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.