Susak - Emigration From Susak and Immigration To America

Emigration From Susak and Immigration To America

Because Susak is an island, people have been coming and going from it throughout history. Emigration from Susak was a personal choice and there are, therefore, likely as many reasons why people left the island as there were emigrants.

The most general and understandable reasons why Susak’s population left the island was due to poverty, famine, lack of lucrative employment opportunities, and the desire for a better life. However, the island experienced a mass exodus between 1948 through the mid-1960s directly due to the political climate and communist policies of Marshall Tito.

After World War II, Yugoslavia’s new leader, Marshall Tito, in an effort to modernize and to somewhat rebuild the newly-formed Yugoslavia, required that all able-bodied citizens work for the state for a period of time without payment. Tito’s plan brought many citizens from the country’s rural and outlying areas, like Susak, to work primarily in the country’s urban areas such as Zagreb and Sarajevo.

Many of the people from Susak did not want to work under Tito’s plan because their home was not receiving any benefits from their labors or from Tito’s plan. Those who left were neither lazy nor necessarily against the new government; rather, they simply wanted a tangible and native benefit from their labors. Therefore, after the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, more than 80 percent of Susak’s population left the island.

Susak’s inhabitants immigrated to the United States for mainly two reasons. First, they believed that the United States would be able to offer them better opportunities for wealth, employment, education, and standard of living. Second, most, if not all, of the people who emigrated from Susak prior to World War II had moved to the United States—primarily to the area in and around Hoboken, New Jersey. This made the choice of where to immigrate to easier for the islanders who wanted to leave the island, but were undecided as to where to go.