What the Immigrants Make, America Takes: Work in Immigrant Communities

Abstract

Throughout the nation’s history, one of the main reasons that Americans have been receptive to immigration has been the need for labor. During the colonial era, indentured servants and black slaves from Africa, involuntary migrants, supplemented the labor that European settlers poured into farms and plantations they hoped would yield sustenance for families and, eventually, commodities for commerce. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, many northern states abolished slavery as a labor system. Northern farmers found slave labor too costly and impractical for the small plot agriculture common in that region. The need for labor in the growing commercial and industrial sectors was satisfied by migrants from northern and western Europe and some free blacks. Much of the South continued to rely on black slave labor on its farms and plantations where large gangs of laborers made cotton production increasingly profitable. There, slavery persisted until the slaves were emancipated by the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War.