The Same Bet, Different Century

A family immigration story from Board member Eric Likness

“What have I gotten myself into.”

Those were my great-great-grandfather’s words as he stepped onto the treeless South Dakota prairie in the 1880s. No mountains to break the wind. No sea. Just flat land in every direction. Nothing like the Norwegian fjord they had left behind.

I think about that line a lot. It’s what it sounds like when someone has made an enormous decision and is standing in the consequences before any of it has paid off.

My relatives left Norway because the math did not work.

Before oil and before roads, a Norwegian valley meant isolation. A farm too small to split among five sons. Someone had to go. They packed what they could carry. They crossed an ocean for a place they knew only by rumor and letter. Then they kept going inland. Another few thousand miles. The landscape had nothing in common with home.

Today’s immigrants are standing in that same moment. The people who built this country stood there before them.

Two Landscapes, One Journey

I stood in the Orkla valley this summer. Green fields and trees fold down to a river. Farms tucked into slopes worked for a thousand years. A few days later I stood on Karmøy, out on the coast, where the land opens up and the sea takes over. Both places could be literal postcards.

I went to see where my family came from. I came back understanding why they left. The valleys are stunning, but they are also remote in a way that is hard to feel until you are standing in one. Cabin fever is definitely something when all your neighbors are in walking distance. Before roads, before rail, a valley could mean a farm cut off from the next farm by geography as much as distance. That must be why they’re so keen on cross country skiing!

For most of my ancestors’ lives there, Norway was not the wealthy country it is today. The oil was not found until the 1950s. Before that, this was a poor nation with a lot of people and not enough usable land. Especially once you got past the third or fourth son in a family.

So people left. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, my great-great-grandparents’ generation packed up and left a place they knew completely for a place they knew only by rumor.

South Dakota settlers, credit South Dakota Public Broadcasting

The Homestead Act

They were not just showing up and hoping. There was a structure underneath the gamble.

The Homestead Act said: claim a piece of land, work it, live on it, improve it. After five years it was yours. The government provided the opportunity. The immigrant supplied the labor and the risk.

This was the deal:

• Live on the land for 5 consecutive years
• Build a dwelling (minimum 10′ x 12′)
• Cultivate/improve at least 10 acres
• Pay $18 filing fee
• File for deed after 5 years (but within 7 years)

That deal turned “what have I gotten myself into” into a farm. A family. Eventually, four generations later, me.

The Frontier Moved

The 1880s frontier does not exist anymore. The prairies got claimed, plowed, fenced, and turned into the Midwest we know now.

But I do not think the country ran out of frontier. I think the frontier moved.

It is not open land anymore. It is open problems. STEM shortages. Healthcare gaps. Fields where American innovation is starved for talent it does not yet have.

Just like in the 1880s, there are people on the other side of an ocean right now who have exactly what is needed. They have a very good reason to leave where they are. A stalled economy. Political instability. A place that simply has no room left for what they can do.

This is why I said yes to serving on the Brain Drain Unlimited Foundation’s board. The organization’s premise is a play on a term from 1963, when “brain drain” described talented people leaving their home countries for opportunity elsewhere. We exist to make sure America is on the receiving end of it.

Visa guidance. Credential evaluation. The unglamorous paperwork of turning “I have a skill the U.S. needs” into an actual, working life here. It is the modern version of the Homestead Act. Different frontier. Same trade. Opportunity for effort. Extended to someone willing to bet everything on a place they have never seen.

The gift was from France, the copper was from Visnes, Norway. Can the meaning endure?

The Welcome They Never Had

My ancestors didn’t get on that ship because America owed them anything. They got on it because someone, somewhere, built a system that said: if you are willing to do the work, there is a place for you here.

That system is the only reason I exist where I exist, doing what I do.

My great-great-grandfather arrived to no one. The Scandinavians were shunned just like other immigrants. But eventually, family welcomed family. Life moved on. And unlike so many places where this isn’t possible: they became American.

But what if there had been a system waiting from the start that didn’t rely on rumors and family? That is what the Board does. We are the “family” you never had waiting for you. We are not charity. We are the continuation of the original deal that built this country.

That original piece of land is still in our family over a century later, and my family’s journey is always in mind. So, I can serve and pay back what was given to our family.

I can help write the modern version of that same offer for someone standing exactly where my family stood a hundred and forty years ago. Wondering “what have I gotten myself into?” (except great-great-grand-dad’s language was probably a tad more colorful than that)

I would like to make sure the journey is worth it for the next family to contribute to the United States.

Talent is ready, let’s get it moving.