Question

What role did immigration play in America’s industrial growth?  Were these new immigrants allowed to vote and did that make a difference?

Answer 1

The immigrant community's size and selectivity, as well as its disproportionate residence in large cities, meant that they were the pillar of the American industrial workforce. In 1920, immigrants and their children comprised more than half of manufacturing workers, and if the third generation is included, then more than two-thirds of manufacturing workers have been of recent immigrant stock. While higher salaries and better working conditions may have encouraged more long-resident native-born workers to the industrial economy, the scale and pace of the American industrial revolution may well have slowed.

Factory owners began to replace the new immigrants with better paying American and British workers. Business leaders want more of the new employees. They encouraged the immigrants in the old country to write letters to their friends and relatives. "Tell them that there are plenty of jobs to come into America."

U.S. letters put in even more immigrants. The big steamship firms also helped industry gain more of the new workers. Around Europe they paid thousands of agents to sell tickets for the trip to America. Their efforts meant that immigrant-filled steamships which brought grain to Europe could return to America.

The dramatic shift in the immigration regime in the 1920s presents a potentially useful opportunity to design well-identified studies of this era's effect on the economy of immigration. In addition, immigrant voters affected important policy decisions beyond their effects on the economy, including, perhaps, the design of social welfare services in the 1930's.