The Three Phases of U.S.-Bound Immigration

Maricopa County, Arizona, was not a good place to be in the first years of the twenty-first century if you were foreign and of brown skin. A child of Italian immigrants retired from the Drug Enforcement Administration and then turned county sheriff unleashed a veritable campaign of terror against Latin American immigrants, aiming to make the county as inhospitable to them as possible. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was enthusiastically egged on by a white electorate composed largely of retirees from northern states who could not see any contradiction between their hiring of Mexicans and Guatemalans as nannies, maids, and gardeners and the persecution to which Sheriff Joe subjected them.

Repeatedly elected by Maricopa citizens, Arpaio devised ever more refined ways of punishing Mexicans and Central Americans unlucky enough to find themselves in Phoenix, Tempe, or the rural areas of the county. Although not all of them came surreptitiously across the border, Arpaio and his men acted as if they all were illegal. Brown-skinned people in Maricopa were guilty until proven innocent. Finally, in December 2011, the Federal Justice Department released a report claiming that "Sheriff Joe Arpaio harasses, intimidates and terrorizes Latinos and immigrants, and he's been doing it for years." Sheriff Joe stated that he would not go down without a fight, but faced with the prospect of a massive federal lawsuit, his reign of terror may be coming to an end.

The antics of Joe Arpaio in southern Arizona highlight a leitmotif found throughout the history of immigration to America. Although the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty speak of an open country welcoming the poor and wretched of the earth, realities on the ground have been very different. As in Maricopa, foreigners who fuel the local economy with their labor, not only as urban servants but as hands in the fields, have been consistently persecuted by the authorities and denounced by nativists as a threat to the nation. As noted by a number of authors, this peculiar American waltz between labor demand and identity politics has repeated itself in every major period of immigration dating back to colonial days.

As we will see, the contradiction between welcoming foreign workers and demonizing their languages and cultures has been more apparent than real, having played into the hands of a number of actors. Sheriff Arpaio's repeated election in Maricopa happened for a reason, as he represented the linchpin of a de facto functional immigration policy. Unraveling these and other riddles of the peculiar relationship between immigration and the development of American society and economy is the goal of this book. We begin the story with the great waves of immigration accompanying the American industrial revolution.

THE GREAT EUROPEAN WAVE, 1880–1930

Political Economy

As shown in table 1, more than twenty-three million immigrants came to the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. Certainly, not all of them stayed; many eventually returned home or even engaged in a back-and-forth movement depending on the ups and downs of labor demand on both sides of the ocean. As many as half of certain peasant-origin groups, such as the Southern Italian contadini, went back at some point, while more than 90 percent of eastern European Jews left their places of origin never to return. Be that as it may, the sediment that these human waves left over time was substantial enough to cause significant changes in the demography of the receiving nation. By 1910, the foreign-born accounted for 14.7 percent of the American population and for 22 percent of those living in urban places.

As Simon Kuznets and Brinley Thomas showed in detail, the great waves of European immigration were, by and large, the product of the transatlantic political economy. If conceived as a system, this economy generated enormous synergy among its complementary parts. Beginning in England at the start of the nineteenth century, the advance of European industrialization continuously uprooted peasant masses whose economic livelihood was rendered precarious by advances in capital-intensive agriculture and whose only alternative was migration, either to industrializing cities or abroad. As Kuznets states:

The shift from Great Britain and Ireland to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and then to Italy and Eastern Europe, follows the trail of the industrial revolution in Europe. It at least suggests that immigration to the United States provided a welcome alternative to population groups displaced by revolutionary changes in agriculture and industry; and thus facilitated, in no small measure, the course of industrialization in the European countries. This migration may thus be viewed as an adjustment of population to resources, that in its magnitude and the extent to which it adapted itself to purely economic needs has few parallels in history.

On the other side of the Atlantic the European waves were not well received by everyone, but they were welcomed by a politically decisive class, namely, capitalists bent on breaking the hold of independent craftsmen and skilled workers so as to meet the demand of a vast market for cheap manufactures. This was no easy feat. As Rosenblum notes, Tocquevillean democracy in America was grounded on independent small producers whose determination to avoid lifelong wage slavery led to a proliferation of enterprises whose craftsmen-owners freely and personally interacted with their journeymen. These, in turn, planned to found their own enterprises in due time.

This tradition went hand in hand with the settlement of a vast frontier by independent farmers, whose demand for agricultural implements and manufactured goods created a comfortable synergy with the products of small-scale industrial shops. The challenge for the rising class of capitalist manufacturers was how to break this synergy so that markets could be expanded at home and abroad. As Brinley Thomas demonstrated, immigration prior to the 1870s preceded indicators of economic development such as railway construction and demand for bituminous coal: "That was the pioneering phase when a comparatively small nation was engaged in subduing a continent and the rate of expansion was conditioned by the arrival of new labor.... Moreover, the railways could not have been built without the gangs of laborers, many of them Irish, recruited in the East and transported to the construction camps."

After 1870, however, the causal correlation reversed itself, and indicators of economic development started to precede mass migration. This is the moment when the "pull" of American wages, advertised by paid recruiters sent to Europe, began to make its mark among Italian and eastern European peasants whose economic existence was rendered increasingly precarious by industrialization in their own countries. As table 1 also shows, southern and central Europeans progressively displaced migrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, as major sources of U.S.-bound migration. Their massive arrival led to a radical transformation in the composition of the American working class, from independent and quasi-independent craftsmen and journeymen to unskilled workers.

Naturally, the native working class vigorously, and often violently, resisted the changes engineered by industrial capitalists. Better than any other movement, the Knights of Labor exemplified this resistance. The phenomenal rise in the membership of this order and the bitter struggles that ensued coincided with a rise in factory production that became generalized by the 1880s. The Knights grew in membership from about 104,000 in July 1885 to more than 702,000 one year later: "The idea of solidarity of labor ceased to be merely verbal, and took on flesh and life; general strikes, nation-wide boycotts, and nation-wide political movements were the order of the day. Although the upheaval came with the depression, it was the product of permanent and far reaching changes which had taken place during the seventies and the early eighties."

The Knights were, in the end, unsuccessful. The master-journeyman relation was gone forever and, with it, the social basis for democratic equality and self-reliant individualism that were founding elements of the American republic. European migration did not change the fundamental pillars of American society—its elites, its class structure, or its constitutional order; what it accomplished was to alter the demographic composition of the population and, along with it, the character of the American working class. Henceforth, workers became dependent on trade unions rather than independent ownership as their sole basis for having a "voice" in their nation's political process.

European migration accelerated to such an extent that it made the causal order between capitalist development and population displacement uncertain. While originally promoted by capitalist firms through deliberate recruitment to staff the incipient factory system, the movement produced such an abundance of cheap unskilled labor as to trigger new waves of technological innovation to take advantage of it, in the process burying forever the independent artisan class. As Thomas concluded: "The massive inflow into the United States of cheap labour from Southern and Eastern Europe coincided with technical innovations calling for a 'widening' of the capital structure. The changing technique in the expanding industries entailed minute subdivision of operations and a wide adoption of automatic machines worked by unskilled, often illiterate men, women, and children. After 1900, the new supply of manpower was so abundant that firms using the new techniques must have driven out of the market many old firms committed to processes depending on human skill."

As shown in table 2, male immigrants around 1910 were overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder. While illiterate or poorly educated first-generation migrants were pretty much stuck at the bottom of that ladder, prospects for the better educated and, especially, for the children born in America were much brighter. As it kept growing, the new industrial economy generated multiple economic opportunities accessible to those with a modicum of education. A universal public-education system opened the doors for such positions to second-generation youths. Naturally, it was the children of earlier immigrant waves—primarily the British, German, Scandinavian, and Irish—who benefited most from such circumstances. They needed a continuous supply of unskilled Italians, Poles, and other eastern European workers to keep fueling a mass industrial economy that was propelling them to positions of ever greater wealth and prosperity. This is a fundamental reason why nativist reactions against the southern and eastern European waves and the consequent identity politics were kept in abeyance until the third decade of the twentieth century.

Identity Politics

Despite the extraordinary synergies in the transatlantic political economy between Europe and North America, the mass of peasant immigration from Catholic countries of the European periphery could not but awaken sentiments of rejection and hostility among the native-born. Such sentiments and the resulting anti-immigrant mobilizations accumulated over time as the mass of foreigners extended throughout the national territory and as the economic "mobility machine" fueled by their labor slowed down in the wake of World War I. In chapter 5 we will examine in detail the interplay between nativist discrimination and identity politics during this period. The main point here is that the interplay between the economic basis of immigration and the cultural reaction to it was definitely evident during those years.

Anti-immigrant sentiment was fueled by a conjunction of groups that saw the relentless flow of foreigners as a direct threat. First, skilled native workers and their organizations were pushed aside by the onslaught of unskilled migrant labor. While the Knights of Labor put forward an ideology of universal brotherhood among all workers and of radical transformation of the capitalist factory system, realities on the ground continuously undermined that ideology and put the confrontation between skilled natives and illiterate foreign peasants into sharp focus. Second, there was a general malaise among the native population at being surrounded by a sea of foreign faces, accents, and religious practices and at finding themselves increasingly cast as "outsiders in their own land." Nativist reactions took multiple forms, from violent attacks and lynching of foreigners to organized campaigns to Americanize them as quickly as possible.

In March 1911 the White League, a New Orleans organization akin to the Ku Klux Klan, lynched eleven Italian immigrants accused of conspiring to murder the city's police chief. Six were about to be released after being found not guilty. Their dark Mediterranean features undoubtedly contributed to their instant indictment by the mob. Commenting on the incident, the Harvard intellectual Henry Cabot Lodge characterized it not as a mere riot but as a form of revenge, "which is a kind of wild justice." He characterized the earlier acquittals as "gross miscarriages of justice," since the Italians were undoubtedly active in the Mafia.

Cabot Lodge's stance reflected the third set of forces in favor of nativist radicalism: the concern among American intellectuals that so many foreigners would dilute the moral fiber of the nation and the integrity of its institutions. In an academic environment dominated by the social Darwinist evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and the "science" of eugenics, the intellectual and moral inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans was taken for granted and their capacity for eventual assimilation into American culture widely questioned. The statistician Richard Mayo Smith warned that "the thing we have to fear most is the political danger of the infusion of so much alien blood into our social body that we shall lose the capacity and power of self-government." Similarly, in his 1926 volume Intelligence and Immigration psychologist Clifford Kirkpatrick argued against expecting much progress among immigrants through the reform of school programs because "definite limits are set by heredity, and immigrants of low innate ability cannot by any amount of Americanization be made into intelligent American citizens capable of appropriating and advancing a complex culture."

Under the intellectual zeitgeist of the time and the leadership of such public thinkers, the restrictionist movement gathered momentum. The movement was reinforced by three major forces in the economic infrastructure. First, as noted by Thomas, the progressive closure of the frontier and the slowing down of the industrialization process began to limit the "economic engine" propelling native workers and members of the second generation on the backs of foreign labor. The mass of newcomers progressively ceased to be the backbone of a segmented labor market and became a source of direct competition for natives. Second, the minority of educated immigrants with union and party experience in Europe and the Americanized second generation mobilized against capitalist exploitation, becoming, in many regions, the backbone of the union movement. The enthusiasm of industrialists for foreign labor cooled significantly when confronted with such unexpected resistance. Immigrants with industrial backgrounds were those who contributed primarily to the first radical cohorts in America: "The spirit of a disciplined, intelligent, and aggressive socialist army was typified by the organized working-class movement of Germany. The leaders of this mighty force were deeply respected at home and abroad. It was men trained in such a movement who tried to build up a duplicate in the United States."

Events back home also contributed to the radicalization of certain immigrant nationalities, such as Russian Jews and Slavs. As Fine noted, "almost two-thirds of the members of the Workers' (Communist) Party were born in countries which were either part of the old Russian empire or inhabited by Slavs." The horrors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York stimulated labor militance in the needle trades. As a result, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, each of which had a largely Jewish, Italian, and Polish membership, developed into two of the strongest labor unions in the United States. Thus, the fundamental function of immigrant labor to American industrialism, which included not only supplementing a scarce domestic labor force but disciplining it through strike-breaking and the acceptance of poor working conditions, gradually weakened. The stage was set for the search by capitalist firms of a new source of pliable labor to replace increasingly militant immigrants and their descendants.