Resettlement to Argentina

Origins and purpose

The First Five Year Plan of 1947 to 1951 put a figure on the government's population aims, the incorporation of four million foreigners in five years. A draft Ley de Bases attached to the plan built immigration policy around three principles, spontaneity, selection and channelling, preferring those held to be closest to Argentine characteristics in origin, customs and language, and those who would work in agriculture, crafts and skilled industrial trades.2

Two new bodies were created at the end of 1946 and reported directly to the presidency. The Delegacion Argentina de Inmigracion en Europa, the DAIE, selected candidates and obtained entry permits in Europe; the Comision de Recepcion y Encauzamiento de Inmigrantes, the CREI, placed them in the Argentine labour market. In 1946 the DAIE's only two seats were established in Italy and Spain, the countries whose emigrants best matched the official ethnic preference, and bilateral agreements with those states followed in 1947 and 1948.12

The older Direccion de Inmigracion became the Direccion General de Migraciones in November 1947, and from February 1949 it passed to the Secretaria Tecnica as the Direccion Nacional de Migraciones, alongside the CREI and the DAIE.12

Volodymyr Yushkevych places the Argentine intake among the targeted migration schemes that several Latin American states ran in the late 1940s, and states that the Peron government used refugee admissions both to boost industrial capacity and to signal an anti-communist stance. The plan's own wording, as quoted by Maria Damilakou, required immigrants to be selected, assimilable, morally and physically sane, rationally distributed and economically useful.1619

How it worked in practice

A confidential report on the DAIE's work at Genoa in 1947 describes a triple selection, ideological, professional and physical. The Rome office screened candidates ideologically from lists supplied by Italian provincial and regional labour offices, then notified the Italian labour ministry so that the chosen were gathered at the ports four days before sailing. Professional and physical selection took place at the ports, where the lists were checked against the register of people considered undesirable and against those rejected at an earlier embarkation. The first embarkation recruited by the DAIE left Genoa on 4 June 1947.1

Three categories of passenger appear in the report: beneficiaries of the immigration agreement and their first degree relatives; Dodero call passengers, who obtained a free landing permit from the CREI against a guarantee from the shipping company that had sold them a call ticket; and those travelling at their own expense. Special Programmes recruited technicians for the naval, war, military manufacturing and aeronautical missions.1

Displaced persons in Germany and Austria fell outside this apparatus, since no DAIE office worked there. Their names travelled on IRO nominal lists, and several thousand received collective free landing permits requested by the national committees representing their communities in Argentina. Two surviving lists were sent by the IRO office for the French zone of Austria at Innsbruck to the Argentine consulate general at Genoa in 1948, asking that the holders be visaed there on the eve of departure rather than crossing the Soviet zone to reach Vienna. Marina Moseykina records that Peron sent a commission to select migrants in the IRO camps, preferring healthy men up to forty five and women up to thirty five.14

Most people left by ship, with the IRO handling the emigration formalities. Among the transit places already described on this site, the Funk-Kaserne Transit Centre at Munich and Bagnoli near Naples are where medical and consular formalities were completed before embarkation. Arrivals came ashore at the port of Buenos Aires and were received at the Hotel de Inmigrantes, the state reception complex opened in 1911, which could sleep three thousand people. Lodging was free for five days by regulation, extended in cases of illness or where work had not been found; Hungarian arrivals recalled food and lodging there for between one and three weeks after a three-week sea voyage. The complex had a landing stage, a hospital and a labour office, and medical inspection began on board.561318

The same channels admitted people with a collaborationist past. Senkman states that from 1947 to 1949 the DAIE disregarded the non Latin origin of several thousand Croatian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian and Baltic collaborationist refugees as well as Nazi Germans and Austrians, while Jewish displaced persons faced the heaviest exclusion and communists were barred on ideological grounds.1

The bilateral agreements with Italy and Spain had a migration content of their own. The Commercial and Financial Agreement signed with Italy in October 1947 included a chapter establishing that the Italian government would facilitate the emigration of workers to Argentina, and articles 30 and 31 of the Commercial Agreement signed with Spain at the end of 1948 promoted the emigration of skilled workers.19

Argentine diplomacy also reached displaced people outside the IRO camps. In Turkey, where escapees from eastern Europe did not enter the American or Australian resettlement programmes, Latin American embassies increased their involvement: Argentina issued visas to Romanians and Hungarians, while Brazil assisted Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks and Iranians.16

A study of the Hungarian exiles gives a measure of the comparative pull. Hungarian exiles began arriving in Argentina towards the end of 1947, most of them after years in Austrian and Bavarian refugee camps, and the countries of South America, with Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela at the forefront, accepted displaced persons with almost no preconditions. Official IRO data cited in that study record 4,800 Hungarians reaching Argentina in 1948 from the German and Austrian sectors under North American control, against 2,100 to Brazil, 1,700 to Australia, 380 to Canada, 210 to South Africa and 130 to the United States.18

The exclusion of Jewish displaced persons is documented from the Argentine side by the Museo del Holocausto de Buenos Aires. Between November 1945 and June 1947 the Direccion Nacional de Migraciones was headed by Santiago Peralta, a nationalist anthropologist whom the museum describes as an outspoken antisemite, who promoted selection criteria based on ethnicity and culture and argued that Jews lacked social affinities with the Argentine nation. The museum estimates that between 1945 and 1949 around 4,800 Jews entered Argentina, of whom approximately 3,300 did so illegally.17

The Ukrainian experience within it

The Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts the third period of Ukrainian immigration to Argentina at about 6,000 people between 1946 and 1950, displaced persons from the camps in Germany and Austria, a large proportion of them educated and professional. That figure covers Ukrainians over those five years and is separate from the all nationality totals above. Senkman's breakdown of the 32,172 IRO assisted arrivals to the end of 1949 gives about 10,000 from Yugoslavia, 6,000 from Poland, 5,500 from Russia and Ukraine counted together, and 3,000 from Hungary.18

The two Innsbruck lists show the composition of individual consignments rather than any total. The list of 29 April 1948 recorded 57 displaced persons holding free landing permits, of whom 6 were Ukrainians. The list of 28 May 1948 recorded 186, of whom 162 were Ukrainians. These are samples from one occupation zone.1

The new arrivals joined established Ukrainian settlements in Buenos Aires, in Berisso in Buenos Aires province, and in Misiones and Chaco. Prosvita had been founded at Berisso in February 1924 and obtained legal personality in 1932, and the Vidrodzhennia society at Buenos Aires in 1939. After the war the two societies set up a relief committee to help displaced persons resettle in Argentina, and in 1947 the Ukrainian Central Representation in Argentina was established as an umbrella body. Serge Cipko describes the third wave as small in number but the most politicised of the three; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that it gave the two societies differing orientations, Prosvita towards the Bandera faction of the OUN and Vidrodzhennia towards the Melnyk faction.89101112

What happened afterwards

The terms tightened from 1949. Collective landing permit requests gave way to individual applications, in which the petitioner had to guarantee the refugee's housing, employment and maintenance. Moseykina records that in the same year the authorities barred the issue of visas in Europe to applicants of Slavic origin. The amnesties of 1948 and 1949 then regularised a large undocumented population already in the country, victims and perpetrators of the war among them.14

Maria Silvia Di Liscia describes the Hotel de Inmigrantes being gradually abandoned as mass overseas immigration declined, under economic and administrative pressure. It ceased to receive arrivals in 1953, the closing year of the arrival records that begin in 1882, and later became the Museo Nacional de la Inmigracion under the Direccion Nacional de Migraciones.56

Organised European migration passed to a new body. The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, the CIME or ICEM, was set up at Brussels in 1951; Peronist Argentina had opposed its creation and did not join until 1953. The displaced persons route out of the German, Austrian and Italian camps had by then closed.17

The displaced persons intake sat inside a much larger migration. Maria Damilakou records that more than half a million immigrants arrived in Argentina between 1946 and 1951, with net migration rising from fewer than 4,000 in 1946 to 46,000 in 1947, 138,000 in 1948 and 157,000 in 1949, and peaking at 160,000 in 1950. These totals cover all immigration and are separate from the IRO figures for displaced persons.19

Argentina became a member of the ICEM in February 1953, and between 1952 and 1961 the organisation transferred some 110,000 immigrants to the country, of whom 92,655 were Italians, alongside about 14,000 Spaniards who arrived between 1957 and 1961 after Spain joined in 1956. That flow continued the Italian and Spanish labour migration of the 1940s rather than the resettlement of displaced persons.19