The Role Of Immigration And The Industrial Revolution In The Twentieth Century

Immigration and the Industrial Revolution in the Twentieth Century
The influx of immigrants in the late nineteen hundreds was the factor most directly responsible for the Industrial Revolution in the United States at the turn of the century. As the poor immigrants of Europe flooded America, they quickly needed jobs and transportation. To supply these to needy immigrants, more and more factories were needed, leading to the rise of industrialism in America.
Following the Civil War, the United States saw rapid growth in industrial manufacturing. With the readily available presence of Southern cotton, Northern textile mills became widely occurrent, however, these mills required a workforce mainly found not in American citizens but recent immigrants (The Rise…).
Immigrants entering the United States during the nineteenth century were largely Irish.
These Irish immigrants came to America following the Irish Potato Famine, hoping for a better life than theirs back in Ireland. However, since most Irish immigrants were poor, the area that they entered upon entering the United States was typically where they ended up living; this was the Northern East Coast (Bryant). As more and more poor immigrants migrated to America, Northern cities began to become hubs of culture with many factions, also requiring industrial enhancement to provide for this accelerated growth in city population (City…). Even though these neighborhoods gave new immigrants a chance to feel at home, they still needed to find jobs.
Due to the readily available workforce of immigrants in cities and the demand for laborers in factories, many immigrants began to work in nearby urban mills and factories. However, the German immigrants at the time tended to be wealthier than the Irish and many moved inland to states such as Pennsylvania in hopes of finding farmland (Bryant). Nonetheless, transportation to the inland parts of the country was still difficult to find
(Transportation..).
In order to supply for this increased transportation demand, many railroads and canals were built (Transportation...). In addition to the previous waves of immigrants, recent Chinese laborers that had migrated to the United States ended up working on constructing the Transcontinental Railroad at the end of the century (Bryant). In order to supply for these developments of national infrastructure, immigrants were needed to work in factories on railroad-building materials; they also were a cheap, common and reliable source of labor. In opposition to the aforementioned claim that immigration was the most direct cause of the Industrial Revolution, it can be said that the invention of the cotton gin directly caused this. However, the cotton gin only directly caused the growth of Northern textile mills, not the railroad companies or many other aspects of industrialization. Immigration, on the other hand, affected not only workforce supplied to the factories but also caused a demand for factories; that of transportation. The validity of all of the sources used can be described as accurate. Two sources, Immigration to the United States and City Life in the Late 19th Century are from the Library of Congress and are written by historians as secondary sources taking advantage of the access to a significant amount of primary sources in the Library. Joyce Bryant’s article on immigration published on the Yale Teachers Institute web page lacks any direct citation from primary sources but instead adduces to a hefty set of secondary sources such as encyclopedias. Lastly, the article on The Rise of American Industry by the Independence Hall Association lacks any clear citations. While many of the citations used lack direct quotes from primary sources, their historical facts can be verified with sources from the era. In conclusion, the increased immigration rates during the late nineteenth century caused an increased supply of cheap labor for the growing branches of industry. More specifically, German immigrants in search of farmland were in demand of transportation inland where they could set up farms; this increased the branches of industry dealing with steel and lumber manufacturing. Irish immigrants and other poorer immigrants, however, tended to stay put, finding work most likely at nearby urban textile mills. Therefore, the most direct factor which caused the Industrial Revolution in the United States was increased immigration rates in the late eighteen hundreds.