=The Portuguese.=--A diminutive but interesting migration of recent years is that of the Portuguese, who come, not from Portugal, but from the Cape Verde and Azores Islands, near equatorial Africa. These islands are remarkably overpopulated, and the emigration, nearly 9000 souls in 1906, is a very large proportion of the total number of inhabitants. By two methods did they find their way to America. One was almost accidental, for it was the wreck of a Portuguese vessel on the New England coast that first directed their attention to that section. They have settled mainly at New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they follow the fisheries in the summer and enter the mills in the winter. The other method was solicitation, which took several thousand of them to Hawaii as contract laborers on the sugar plantations. Unlike the Oriental importations to these islands the Portuguese insisted that their families be imported, and then as soon as their contracts expired they left the planters to become small farmers, and are now the backbone of the coffee industry. They and their children are nearly half of the "Caucasian" element of 30,000. In Massachusetts they are of two distinct types, the whites from the Azores and the blacks from the Cape Verde Islands, the latter plainly a blend of Portuguese and Africans. Their standards of living are similar to those of the Italians, though they are distinguished by their cleanliness and the neatness of their homes.
=Syrians and Armenians.=--That the recruiting area of American immigration is extending eastward is no more clearly evident than in the recent migration of Syrians and Armenians. These peoples belong to the Christian races of Asiatic Turkey, whence they are escaping the oppressions of a government which deserves the name of organized robbery rather than government. Within the past thirty years many thousand Syrians of Mount Lebanon have emigrated to Egypt and other Mediterranean countries, to the dependencies of Great Britain and South America. Six thousand of them came to the United States in 1906. They belong mainly to the Greek Church or the Maronite branch of the Roman Catholic Church, and it is mainly American missionary effort that has diverted them to the United States. Unlike other immigrants, they come principally from the towns, and are traders and pedlers. Broadly speaking, says an agent of the Charity Organization Society of New York, "the well-intentioned efforts of the missionaries have been abused by their protégés.... It is these alleged proselytes who have contributed largely to bring into relief the intrinsically servile character of the Syrian, his ingratitude and mendacity, his prostitution of all ideals to the huckster level.... As a rule they affiliate themselves with some Protestant church or mission, abandoning such connections when no longer deemed necessary or profitable."[54]