Immigrant Labor. At least since the 1840s, when
Irish American workers replaced the native‐born “factory girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, immigrants have loomed large in the American working classes. This was especially true between 1880 and 1924, when 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Soon Europeans and their children outnumbered native‐born Americans in factories, mines, steel mills, and automobile plants, while Mexicans,
Hispanic Americans, and
Asian Americans predominated in the agricultural fields of the
West. Foreign‐born women staffed canneries, textile mills, and garment factories and worked as cooks and child‐care providers for middle‐class Americans. The history of American
labor movements during these years is a tale of both immigrant activism and ethnocultural struggle.
With emancipated slaves relegated to the declining agriculture of the
South,
immigration made possible the “Second Industrial Revolution” of the late nineteenth century. Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slavic, and Mexican migrants built the transportation network (first canals, then
railroads) essential to a national mass market. As immigrants became “machine‐tenders” for the new
mass‐production industries, native‐born skilled workers sought to protect their standard of living against low‐wage, unskilled competitors. Legislation restricting immigration—from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924—invariably won organized labor's support.
Ironically, first‐ and second‐generation immigrants dominated the American labor movement of the
Gilded Age and
Progressive Era. Abandoning reformist strategies that tied the interests of wage earners to independent small producers, second‐generation Irish Americans and
German Americans contributed to the rapid growth of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL). After 1900, immigrant women—mostly Irish, Italians, and eastern European Jews—joined with middle‐class American feminists in the
Women's Trade Union League to launch a women's movement that created female strongholds in the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, an industrial union founded (and dominated) by immigrant men.
Immigrants were even more visible as radical activists. Germans dominated the Socialist Labor party and remained prominent in the multiethnic
Socialist Party of America. The
Industrial Workers of the World, with its ideology of revolutionary syndicalism and “one big union,” particularly attracted unskilled immigrant workers, many of them women, as it led huge strikes in the
textile and
mining industries just prior to
World War I. Into the 1930s, Finnish, Slavic, and eastern European Jewish immigrants figured prominently in the
Communist Party—USA.
Overall, however, World War I, with its demands for “100 percent Americanism,” ended this era of immigrant labor activism. Deportations of radicals accompanied the postwar Red Scare, and nativist fears ended unrestrained immigration. By the 1930s, older immigrants in the AFL, along with second‐generation immigrants in the steel and
automotive industries created the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Although radicals remained active in some of its unions, the CIO promised Americanized children of immigrants incorporation into the American mainstream through the
New Deal Era welfare state and the
Democratic party.
The number of immigrants began to rise again in the mid‐1960s, but even so, unskilled workers constituted a much lower proportion among immigrants than a century earlier. Cesar
Chavez's United Farm Workers publicized the plight of low‐wage, seasonal, immigrant (and largely Mexican) workers in southwestern agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s. New garment‐industry sweatshops employing Latina and Asian women in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles recalled the travails and organizing campaigns of past generations. However, with industry and agriculture dropping in importance as employers of labor, and with American labor unions only slowly emerging from a long period of decline in membership and political influence, immigrant workers seemed more marginalized than ever as the twentieth century ended.
See also
Agriculture: Since 1920;
Anticommunism;
Canals and Waterways;
Domestic Labor;
Homework;
Immigration Law;
Industrialization;
Iron and Steel Industry;
Labor Markets;
Migratory Agricultural Workers;
Nativist Movement;
Socialism;
Twenties, The;
Women in the Labor Force.
Bibliography
Dirk Hoerder, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working‐Class Immigrants, 1986.
Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, eds., Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960, 1990.
Donna R. Gabaccia
