Capital versus labor: The enduring economic engine behind American immigration policy

“ I've asked for a few minutes of your time to discuss a matter of national importance — the reform of America's immigration system.
The issue of immigration stirs intense emotions, and in recent weeks, Americans have seen those emotions on display. On the streets of major cities, crowds have rallied in support of those in our country illegally. At our southern border, others have organized to stop illegal immigrants from coming in. Across the country, Americans are trying to reconcile these contrasting images. And in Washington, the debate over immigration reform has reached a time of decision. ”

“ Tonight, I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country.
No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.
Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration—reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net. ”

“ But the effect of immigration on our life is not as simple as the advocates of restriction insist. It is probable that the struggle of the working classes to improve their conditions is rendered more difficult by the incoming tide of unskilled labor. It is probable too that wages are kept down in certain occupations and that employers are desirous of keeping open the gate as a means of securing cheap labor and labor that is difficult to organize. It is also probably true that the immigrant is a temporary burden to democracy and especially to our cities. ”

“ So the employer and the capitalist have combined in all industry, and they fix the price to suit themselves and insist that the workingman shall come to them individually and unorganized and compete with each other for a day's labor, so they can buy labor at the smallest cost and if, perchance, there are not working men enough here, they want the ports of the world opened so they can draw on China or Japan or any other country on the face of the earth, and get working men there to work for them at the smallest price. ”

“ The transatlantic steamship companies have found the business of transporting immigrants to America very profitable and have done much to develop our immigration to its present mammoth proportions. Although the steamship companies deny the fact, a well organized system undoubtedly exists in Europe, by means of which agents and sub-agents of the steamship companies induce emigration. ”

“ There were not native workers enough, and so a steady stream of foreign immigrants flocked over from abroad. They came at first to better their own fortunes by sharing in the unlimited American harvests. Later, our Captains of Industry, regardless of the quality of the new comers, and intent only on securing cheap labor to multiply their hoards, combed the lowest political and social levels of southern Europe and of western Asia for employees. ”

“ Immigration and Americanization The Problems of Immigration.—From its very inception, the American Federation of Labor, like the Knights of Labor before it, was confronted by numerous questions raised by the ever swelling tide of aliens coming to our shores. In its effort to make each trade union all-inclusive, it had to wrestle with a score or more languages. When it succeeded in thoroughly organizing a craft, it often found its purposes defeated by an influx of foreigners ready to work for lower wages and thus undermine the foundations of the union. ”

“ We have used great numbers of aliens in building the railroads of the country, in mines and steel mills, in workshops and factories. On the other hand the flood of immigration has at times proved too strong. It has on occasions served to produce an over-supply of labor and this, in turn, has caused wages to fall. Labor leaders claim that the steady stream of immigrants has prevented the rise in the American workman’s standard of living which otherwise would have taken place. Organized labor would like to place a protective duty upon immigrants. ”

“ It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless some-body else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. ”

“ Capital, indeed, is but the accumulation of labor. Immigration, then, from 1850 to 1860, added to our national products a sum more than double our whole debt on the 1st of July last, and augmenting in a ratio much more rapid than its increase, and thus enabling us to bear the war expenses.'
As the homestead privilege must largely increase immigration, and add especially to the cultivation of our soil, it will contribute vastly to increase our population, wealth, and power, and augment our revenues from duties and taxes. ”

“ And thus it is that the young men, shunning farm and workshop, crowd the cities and haunt stores and counting rooms for employment in constantly increasing numbers, while it is a notorious fact that the American people, the people born and raised upon American soil, turn out so small a proportion of artizans and manual laborers generally, that we have to look in a large measure to foreign immigration to supply that want of society. ”

“ It had become the practice for large capitalists in this country to contract with their agents abroad for the shipment of great numbers of an ignorant and servile class of foreign laborers, under contracts by which the employer agreed, upon the one hand, to prepay their passage, while, upon the other hand, the laborers agreed to work after their arrival for a certain time at a low rate of wages. The effect of this was to break down the labor market, and to reduce other laborers engaged in like occupations to the level of the assisted immigrant. ”

“ They, as a rule, do not become citizens, and are certainly not a desirable acquisition to the body politic. The inevitable tendency of their presence among us is to degrade American labor, and to reduce it to the level of the imported pauper labor.' Page 5359, Congressional Record, 48th Cong.
We find, therefore, that the title of the act, the evil which was intended to be remedied, the circumstances surrounding the appeal to congress, the reports of the committee of each house, all concur in affirming that the intent of congress was simply to stay the influx of this cheap, unskilled labor. ”

“ Tides of alien immigrants were surging into the country to replace the old American stock in the labor market, to lower the standard of living and to increase the pressure of population upon the land. These recent foreigners have lodged almost exclusively in the dozen great centers of industrial life, and there they have accented the antagonisms between capital and labor by the fact that the labor supply has become increasingly foreign born, and recruited from nationalities who arouse no sympathy on the part of capital and little on the part of the general public. ”

“ And, referring back to the report of the committee of the house, there appears this language: 'It seeks to restrain and prohibit the immigration or importation of laborers who would have never seen our shores but for the inducements and allurements of men whose only object is to obtain labor at the lowest possible rate, regardless of the social and material well-being of our own citizens, and regardless of the evil consequences which result to American laborers from such immigration. This class of immigrants care nothing about our institutions, and in many instances never even heard of them. ”

“ No attempt has been made by the Government to attract immigrants until recently, for years ago the conservative element of the population were opposed to inviting strangers into their midst. This sentiment has, however, died out, and there is an increasing desire to do something to call in capital and labor. ”

“ For the "old immigration" from the north of Europe went to the country. The "new immigration" has gone to the cities because the land had all been given away and the only opportunity for immediate employment was to be found in the cities and mining districts. The "new immigration" from the South of Europe is as eager for home-ownership as the "old immigration" from the north of Europe. But the land is all gone, and the incoming alien is compelled to accept the first job that is offered, or starve. It is this too that has stimulated the protest on the part of labor against the incoming tide. ”

“ In the larger cities between 70 and 80 per cent of the population is either foreign born or immediately descended from persons of foreign birth. In New York City 78.6 per cent of the people are of foreign birth or immediate foreign extraction. In Boston the percentage is 74.2, in Cleveland 75.8, and in Chicago 77.5. In the mining districts the percentage is even higher. In other words, almost all of the immigration of the last twenty years has gone to the cities, to industry, to mining. Here the immigrant competes with organized labor. ”

“ And this overseas competition is a serious problem to American labor, especially in the iron and steel industries, in the mining districts, in railroad and other construction work, into which employments the foreigners largely go.
How seriously the workers and our cities are burdened with this new immigration from south and central Europe is indicated by the fact that 56 per cent of the foreign-born population in this country is in the States to the east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio Rivers, to which at least 80 per cent of the present incoming immigrants are destined. ”

“ An addition to this factor, immigrants continued to concentrate in the cities, partly because of the spirit of clannishness, partly because of the disappearance of free land, and partly because the development of agricultural machinery reduced the demand for agricultural laborers. ”

“ With deportation, even to a limited extent, enhanced wages to white labor is mathematically certain. Labor is like any other commodity in the market—increase the demand for it and you increase the price of it. Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely so much you increase the demand for and wages of white labor.
But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth and cover the whole land. Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them any more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country ”

“ The politicians, equally negligent of the real welfare of the United States, gave to these masses of foreigners quick and unscrutinized naturalization as American citizens.
So it fell out that before the end of the nineteenth century a great gulf was opening between Labor and Capital. Now a community can thrive only when all its classes feel that they have COMMON interests; but since American Labor was largely composed of foreigners, it acquired a double antagonism to Capital. ”

“ Restrict immigration to the industrious, sober, law-abiding classes, enforce the law rigorously against rioters, anarchists, and the like, make education compulsory, and teach English in all the public schools, and admit to the factories, the mills, the mines, and other works, the worthy American worker, both white and Colored, upon terms of perfect equality.
It is a burning shame, a disgrace to the country, that our own citizens should be denied the opportunity of earning a livelihood at the suggestion of a herd of ignorant and lawless foreigners. ”

“ After the discovery of gold, and particularly after the opening of the railway construction era, a horde of laborers from China descended upon California. Accustomed to starvation wages and indifferent to the conditions of living, they threatened to cut the American standard to the point of subsistence. By 1876 the protest of American labor was loud and long and both the Republicans and the Democrats gave heed to it. In 1882 Congress enacted a law prohibiting the admission of Chinese laborers to the United States for a term of ten years—later extended by legislation. ”

“ Any system of protection established in the interest of labor would have excluded all immigrants accustomed to a low standard of living. But as a matter of fact the immigration of cheap foreign labor was actively encouraged by the employers in whose interest the high tariff on foreign goods was maintained. ”

“ With the doors of immigration standing wide open vomiting into our industrial world all the cheap white labor of the universe, our Protected capitalists are still able to convince our wage-earners that American capital protects American labor from the competition of foreign “pauper” labor!
Having ground down the price of factory labor to such a low point that they can undersell foreigners in the foreign market, our Privileged and Protected Capitalists can nevertheless convince American laborers that the motive for high tariffs is to enable the Capitalist to pay big wages! ”

“ We should also deal with the subject in such manner as to protect the interests of American labor, which is the capital of our workingmen. ”

“ Owing to the very strict wording of our contract labor law, a very large proportion of our immigrants enter the country under the impression, either false or correct, that they are evading the law. This has a very serious effect upon their character, and upon their attitude toward American institutions. They may readily conceive that a country that has such laws that it is necessary to break them to get in, probably has other 397laws that need to be broken after one is in. The whole system engenders a most dangerous attitude of indifference or hostility to law. ”

“ In this way the employés of railroads and of telegraph companies have, like other working-men, organized themselves in large compact bodies, to be controlled by a common will, for the purpose, among other things, of enabling themselves to arrest, by general and sudden stoppage of work, all railroad transportation and all telegraphing, if the corporations refuse to comply with their demands with regard to wages and treatment. ”

“ Capital, it must be said, feels power and forgets right; labor in its despair grows desperate and violates the law. Capital, to secure and perpetuate its interests, combines into huge corporations which control production and the markets, waters its stock, bribes legislatures, congresses and parliaments; oppresses labor in its wages, robs the people ”

“ The restriction of immigration has reduced the supply of labor and the competition caused by the steady, less dangerous employment at high wages which is now offered in the factories requires a higher level of reward if American youth are to be attracted into the building industry. ”