Migrant Workers

Historical Development

After the emancipation of slaves and indentured servants in the United States, the agricultural and industrial economy was left wounded, and the labor void needed to be quickly filled. Foreign workers began to be imported or lured to fill the gaping demand for cheap labor. The abundance of cheap labor being brought to the United States extended across the globe.

Workers from China and other Asian countries began to fill the cheap-labor market. Slowly, after the beginning of the 20th century, workers from Mexico and the Philippines were also employed, with dismal wages, as the bulk of the agricultural migrant worker force. These foreign workers were usually imported or brought to the United States by white farm owners. Many European migrant workers were recruited under the guise of someday owning their own land, which at that time, for any foreigner, was an impossible feat because of the extremely low wages being paid for their labor. These European workers included Irish, British, German, Italian, Russian, and Hungarian individuals who existed in a truly multicultural migrant workforce.

As the American agricultural and industrial economy began to grow, so did the demand for cheap labor; by 1890, an estimated 55,000 Mexican workers immigrated to the United States in search of work, only to receive unequal treatment by farm owners. Unlike their European and Asian counterparts, Mexican workers were able to move freely across the border to temporary jobs in ranching, farming, and other industries, and then in most cases they returned back home, making up the largest group of migrant workers and the one most desired by landowners.

Workers from Catholic countries such as Ireland and Germany faced unequal treatment and were subject to prejudice because of the overwhelmingly Protestant population in the United States at that time. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers faced their own animosity because of the end of the gold rush, when the American economy became less vibrant and white Americans began to feel threatened by foreign populations.

The Great Depression marked a decline in the agricultural economy as the Dust Bowl ruined most of the crops in the midwest. As a result, many Anglo-Americans migrated to the west coast to find work.

...