Subject: PZP: WHY IMMIGRANTS ARE OFTEN THE BEST EMPLOYEES Date: 2 Aug 1998 08:21:19 GMT From: scottcram@aol.com (ScottCram) Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Newsgroups: alt.politics.economics [Paul Zane Pilzer, God Wants You To Be Rich, 1st ed., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, 116-119] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684825325/astonishmenlinks/ WHY IMMIGRANTS ARE OFTEN THE BEST EMPLOYEES Newcomers Are Often the Fastest to Learn New Methods Before the Civil War, most of the immigrants coming to America were either skilled laborers or professionals - self-motivated to come to the New World to try their fortunes. This changed after Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States. In 1863 President Lincoln asked Congress to pass the ACT TO ENCOURAGE IMMIGRATION, which the president signed into law on July 4, 1864. This act allowed private companies to pay an immigrant’s transportation expenses to the United States in return for a legally binding pledge of the worker’s wages (as repayment for the cost of his or her passage) for up to twelve months. Under this new law, which became known as the CONTRACT LABOR ACT, private recruiters were paid fees for inducing foreign workers to come to the United States. Recruiting and transporting new immigrants quickly became the largest business in the United States. By 1880 the largest company in America was the American Emigrant Company, whose sole business was to recruit immigrants in Europe on behalf of American corporations and towns desirous of skilled laborers. The efforts of these recruiting businesses were the scourge of European nationalists, who feared the economic loss of their skilled professionals. In England, the press disparaged the U.S. recruiters, with manufacturer protesting in 1865 that the emigration of one spinner involves the stoppage of probably ten additional hands. In France the same year, the government denied the U.S. consul at Marseilles permission to circulate copies of the Act to Encourage Immigration. And in Germany, the press accused the U.S. government of swindling in passing the Act to Encourage Immigration. However, ironically, while the emphasis of most of these programs was on skilled labor, the majority of people recruited were unskilled workers. Eager potential immigrants often lied to the recruiters about their skills, and in some cases may have even been encouraged to do so by their mercenary recruiters. Recruiting immigrants was a very lucrative business, with the recruiter paid on arrival for bringing over skilled workers - even if their skills didn’t turn out to be what they were purported to be. And yet, also ironic, in many cases these unskilled workers turned out to be more productive than truly skilled workers because the new arrivals were much more receptive to using the newest methods and tools in their work. For example, in the steel industry, at every step of production involving technological change after 1880, managers discovered that it was easier to teach new methods to completely unskilled workers than to retrain skilled workers from related crafts and industries. By using almost exclusively immigrant unskilled labor and training them in the newest methods, the U.S. steel industry became the world’s largest almost overnight - total U.S. steel production rose from twenty-two thousand tons in 1867 to 11 million tons in 1900. The great steelmaker and industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was fanatical about continually training unskilled immigrants in the newest production methods. He became famous for his scrap and build policies, which consisted of utterly destroying his own steel plants and then starting over with new workers utilizing the latest technology. Complacent British steelmakers once criticized Carnegie’s scrap-and-build policies, boasting that they (the British) were using the same methods and equipment for twenty years. That, Carnegie replied, is what is the matter with the British steel trade. Looking back today, we can easily see what was happening. Innovative American entrepreneurs were turning some of the world’s least skilled people into the world’s most productive, setting the nation on a course to becoming the greatest economic power in the world. But unfortunately, this is not how things were perceived by many existing Americans, who saw the continued waves of new immigrants as a threat to their economic security. Each newly arriving group of immigrants became the scapegoat for the problems of those already in the United States who were unable or unwilling to make their own American dreams come true. Racist labor and political organizations were formed throughout America to disparage immigration. Italians, the largest group of new immigrants, were forced to attend all-black schools in twelve states. In 1875 The New York Times said of Italian-Americans that it was perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing them. In a New Jersey mill town, several days of rioting erupted after a local firm hired fourteen Jewish-Americans. When the xenophobic native-born Americans were unable to stop immigration through intimidation of the new arrivals, they took their case straight to the consumer. The (white) union label was introduced for the first time in San Francisco in 1872 by white, unionized cigar makers to signal to consumers that their products were manufactured only by white, Caucasian hands. We see a similar phenomenon today when certain American managers fail to maintain the design of their products or their plants at competitive levels. Rather than learn new methods of doing things that would allow the quality of their American-made products to speak for themselves in the marketplace, these managers attempt to use (or abuse) American patriotism - inducing consumers to purchase their inferior or overpriced products just because they are "Made in America". But no group, organized or disorganized, did more harm to the immigrants, and ultimately to America itself, than the Dillingham Commission, which was chartered by Congress in 1907 to report on the question of the new immigrants and the resultant mechanization of U.S. industry. The commission, chaired by Senator William Dillingham from Vermont, blamed the new immigrants for depressing wages, causing unemployment, and hampering the development of trade unionism in America. The commission’s biased report against mechanization and immigration created a "Dictionary of Races", which concluded that the new immigrants [mostly southern and eastern European] were racially inferior to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. The fifty-two-volume report of the commission took more than three hundred staff members over three years to complete and became the basis for a body of legislation that severely restricted the immigration of certain races, mainly those residing in southern and eastern Europe. Immigration from Asia and Africa was basically prohibited. No less a great statesman than President Woodrow Wilson fought the racist protectionists from 1912 until 1920; finally the protectionists won when President Harding succeeded Wilson in 1921. Supported by President Harding, the body of anti-immigration legislation against southern and eastern Europeans culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924. The 1924 act was also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act because it banned immigration entirely for persons of Japanese ancestry. The day the act took effect was declared a national day of mourning in 1924, and the anti-Japanese provisions were, shamefully, not repealed by the U.S. Congress until 1952. Immigration fell from over 1 million per year at the turn of the century to less than fifty thousand per year during the 1930s - coincidentally, this decline began the greatest depression the country has ever known.