the immigrant workforce
- industrial work force expanded in the late nineteenth century as demand for factory labor grew
- Was a continuing flow of rural Americans into factory towns and cities
- Also a great wave of immigration from Mexico, Asia, Canada, and above all Europe in the decades following the Civil War
- In the 1870's and 1880's most of the immigrants to eastern industrial cities and from the nation's traditional sources: England Ireland, and northern Europe.
- By the end of the century the major sources of immigrants had shifted with large numbers of southern and eastern Europeans
- In the West the major sources of immigration was form Mexico and Asia.
- The new immigrants were coming to american in part o escape poverty and oppression in their homelands but also because they were lured to the united States by expectations of new opportunities
- Often times these expectations were the result of false promises
- Railroads tried to lure immigrants into their western landholding by distributing misleading advertisements overseas
- Industrial employers effectively recruited immigrant workers under the Labor Contract which permitted them to pay for the passage of workers in advance and deduct the amount later from their wages
- The arrival of these new groups introduced heightened ethnic tensions into the dynamic of the working class
- Immigrants had a hard time adjusting to the nature of modern industrial labor