Emigration in the Aftermath of the Trianon Treaty and the US Immigration Restrictions Act

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The post-World War I era featured new borders in Central and Eastern Europe under the Trianon Treaty as well as the passage of restrictive immigration laws in the United States in 1921 and 1924. While scholars have examined the effects on Hungarian migration of the Trianon Treaty and U.S. quotas separately, rarely do we consider the effect that these two major post-war developments had on each other happening at the same time. Especially in borderlands areas, people’s home villages might not end up in the state they identified with nationally. This had tremendous effects on the likeliness of migrants already in the US to return to Europe. It also closed off the option of going to the United States for many individuals at the very comment that they might be seeking to move because of new political borders. This paper will examine the interplay between the Trianon borders and American immigration restriction legislation in the migration decisions of Hungarians in the 1920s.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Kristina Poznan is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the College of William & Mary. She is completing her dissertation, "Becoming Immigration Nation-Builders: The Development of Austria-Hungary's National Projects in the United States, 1880s-1920s." The project has been supported by a Fulbright Austrian-Hungarian Joint Research Award, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Poznan has offered courses at William & Mary, the Károli Gáspar Reformed University, Christopher Newport University, and Randolph-Macon College. She is a historical consultant for Bettina Fabos's "Proud and Torn," an online interactive visual timeline of Hungarian history, and secretary of the Hungarian Studies Association.