Why did most immigrants to the US in the late 1800s settle in cities and take jobs in factories?

Immigrants wait in line to enter Ellis Island

Men working in a textile factory in 1921

During the Gilded Age there were a large number of immigrants that were coming to North America. During the Gilded Age there were around 11.7 million people that came to America. From those 11.7 million immigrants10.6 million of those immigrants came from Europe, which made up 90 percent of the immigration population. The Canadians made up 6.7 percent and then the Chinese made up 1.7 percent.  From all these immigrants that came a lot of them first came to bigger cities. When they first arrived they usually had nothing expect the clothes that they had on their backs and maybe some pocket change that wasn’t really enough to do anything with. 

The large migration of immigrants to North America allowed for a huge rise in the U.S. economy. Lots of factories started up in large cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Most of the immigrants that took these factory jobs started in the lowest level. Even though some immigrants did know how to run the machinery in the factories from the old country they still had to take the hardest and most difficult jobs possible. The wages were super low and the hours were very unreasonable. It was not uncommon for a person to work more then 12 hours a day and have to work 6 days a week. The working conditions were also very dangerous and not well taken care of. Lots of the people that worked in these factories had fingers crushed or completely cut off. Sometimes people would even lose their limbs because of the terrible working conditions. Even Historian Carl Wittke’s phrased, “ we who built America.” For the unappreciated immigrant workers that worked for terrible wages and horrible working conditions. 

During this time Immigrants didn’t really have a word in what they wanted because they were thought of uneducated people that didn’t know what they wanted. They were treated badly and disrespected. They didn’t speak the language that their bosses spoke so they were treated differently. When they didn’t reach their daily quota they would be deducted from their pay. They were also not allowed to go to the bathroom until their lunch breaks. They were made to work with people from other nationalities so that they couldn’t speak to someone because they didn’t know the same language. This also made it so that the immigrants wouldn’t try to rally together and try to make strikes against the company because they couldn’t communicate with each other. Soon after all this labor unions started to form. These unions started to organize strikes and protests against factories for shorter hours and better pay. They also wanted to stop child labor from happening. But one of the problems with the strikes and protest were that they would lose their jobs to other immigrants that needed the work. Because of all these things happening at the same time the middle class started to form and people started to get paid more and were able to live more comfortably. 

Sources:

Daniels, Roger. 1999. “Immigration in the Gilded Age: Change or Continuity?”. OAH Magazine of History 13 (4). [Oxford University Press, Organization of American Historians]: 21–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163306.

Poddar, Ankur. "Working and Living Conditions." The Industrial Revolution. Accessed May 03, 2016. http://firstindustrialrevolution.weebly.com/working-and-living-conditions.html.

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country’s first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country’s immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.

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Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Some of America’s first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America’s immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America’s native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics–especially the Irish–experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census–a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe–and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Bracero Program

The Bracero Program was a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States signed in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed — making it the largest U.S. contract labor program to date.

The program also addressed Depression-era deportations and brought many Mexican Americans, who were largely targeted for deportation at the time, back to the states.

The program was criticized because workers often faced discrimination, harsh working conditions, and had virtually no job security. Once their contracts expired, some Braceros returned home with little money because of debts incurred to the stores located in employer-operated housing camps, while others stayed in the United States illegally and sought additional work. 

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

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