THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION

Similar to current changes in the labor force, mainly from Asian and Hispanic immigrants, further composition changes came from immigration. As shown in Table 11.3, the large waves of immigrants who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s came principally from three countries: England, Ireland, and Germany. A steady stream of immigrants from England flowed into the United States until the decade of the Civil War; the Irish and the Germans came in ever-increasing numbers through the mid-1850s, repelled by conditions at home and attracted by economic opportunities in a new land. The tragic potato famine of 1845 to 1847 precipitated the heavy Irish emigration. Fleeing starvation and the oppression of hated absentee landlords, the Irish found employment as common laborers and factory hands. (As many American laborers moved west to join the gold rush, opportunities opened up for the new arrivals.) The census of 1850 reported nearly 1 million Irish in the United States, 40 percent of them in large cities, where their “shanty towns” became the notorious slums of the era. The Germans came a little later, following the failure of the democratic and nationalistic revolutions of 1848. Within 15 years, 1.3 million had arrived. Most Germans, having a little capital, settled on farms in the Midwest, but almost one-third of them swelled the populations of booming cities such as Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.

Immigration was also having its effects on the sexual composition of the labor force. By 1860, women constituted only one-fifth of the manufacturing labor force, indicating the lessening relative importance of textile manufacture and the competition of cheap immigrant labor, most of which was male. As it is today, this was a period of significant change in women’s social roles, but then the trend was toward domestic pursuits. The cotton textile industry still employed the most females (many of whom were children); the clothing and shoe industries were second and third in this respect, ahead of woolen textiles. Nevertheless, as Pamela Nickless has shown, despite the transition in the late 1840s from predominantly women workers to male Irish workers, the advance of labor productivity in the textile mills remained high and steady, averaging 4.5 percent annually between 1836 and 1860 (Nickless 1978, 288). Moreover, the slums and initial poor labor opportunities for Irish and other immigrants did not lock them into poverty. Upward mobility and wealth accumulation accompanying changes in jobs and location by the immigrants improved their well-being (see Ferrie 1994).

TABLE 11.3 AVERAGE YEARLY IMMIGRATION BY ORIGIN, 1845-1860 (IN THOUSANDS)

Source: Historical Statistics 1958.