War & Peace Quote by Arthur Capper

A cool, bureaucratic sentence that pretends to be a weather report is really a blueprint for managing a nation’s anxieties. Arthur Capper, a Midwestern Republican power broker shaped by agrarian politics, frames postwar European migration as not just likely but legible: predictable in scale, useful in composition, and implicitly governable. “To be expected” is doing heavy lifting here. It drains contingency and moral urgency out of displacement, turning human upheaval into an economic input the United States can plan around.

The key move is the narrowing of immigrant identity to “men skilled in farming.” Capper isn’t describing Europe so much as he is reassuring America: these aren’t radicals, not city-striking factory hands, not the threatening “new” immigrants associated in the era with crowded tenements and political unrest. They’re farmers. They work the land, they feed the country, they fit the national self-image. The gendered emphasis matters too: “men” signals labor, enlistment in productivity, and a quieter promise of social order.

Context sharpens the intent. Capper’s career sits in the long shadow of U.S. restrictionism and nativist panic, culminating in quota laws that tried to engineer the nation’s demographics. Postwar Europe meant refugees, shattered economies, and ideological tremors. By spotlighting agricultural skill, Capper offers a selective welcome: humanitarian concern is displaced by a transaction. The subtext is that immigration is acceptable when it can be justified as labor policy - and when the newcomers can be cast as familiar, rural, and assimilable.