Restricting the Hordes

This chapter studies how government officials first looked to deportation as a solution to the post-war “immigration problem.” During and after the Red Scare, 1919–1924, government officials enacted new and more stringent immigration restrictions. Their implementation would curtail employers' virtually unfettered access to immigrant labor, a benefit businesses had enjoyed since the onset of industrialization. Companies continued to want immigrant workers, but decades of associating foreigners with labor unrest had reached an apex. Fear of subversive aliens combined with nativism and progressivism to convince many Americans of the need for more extensive exclusion. Only through proactive diligence, contended the restrictionist ranks, could the immigrant danger be ameliorated. The pertinent question was not if the maleficence truly existed but rather how best to eliminate it. Dismissing employers' arguments to the contrary, lawmakers ultimately enacted sweeping new quota-based restrictions, significantly reducing European immigration. Their passage effectively ended an epic chapter of American business and labor history.

Into the New Century

This chapter details how the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 reinforced the presumed connection between immigrants and class-based radicalism that had been building for the previous thirty-five years. Concurrent developments, above and beyond the president's murder, would insure continuation of the linkage. With the end of the 1890s depression, the new century's first decade saw the arrival of record numbers of immigrants, increasingly coming from southern and eastern Europe. Return of commercial prosperity cemented employers' need of their labor, but the continued reliance on foreign-born workers by businesses came amid intensified concerns about the foreigners' problematic behaviors. Over the next ten years, against a backdrop of economic growth coupled with virtually continuous labor conflict, these presumptions would bring heightened calls for immigration restriction, and would push business interests to intensify their efforts to control labor, notably in industries with predominately alien workforces.

Alien Anarchism

This chapter investigates the Haymarket Square rally in 1886, which solidified the presumed connection between aliens and undesirable worker radicalism. Reaction to the Molly Maguires and the Great Railroad Strike had established the practice of blaming immigrants and associated foreign ideologies for the industrial era's loss of workplace harmony, but the stigma did not prevent employers from fulfilling their growing labor needs by hiring large numbers of alien workers. Those recruited regularly included strikebreakers whose presence angered established workers. Through the early 1880s, laborers—not capitalists—tended to harbor animosity toward recent arrivals. When the Haymarket affair renewed and intensified fears of working-class violence, employers resorted to the pattern of implicating the immigrants who labored at their mills, mines, and factories, even as they continued to employ them.