• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Until the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of (voluntary) immigrants to the United States were what today we would consider “white.” Of course, “white” was always a moving target. Consider, for example, the extraordinary statement on skin color made by Benjamin Franklin in his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind”:

The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted who with the English make the principle [sic] Body of White People on the Face of the Earth…Perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country…[yet] such partiality is natural to Mankind.

This was Franklin's view before America achieved independence, while he was still an ardent British patriot. (He himself deleted this passage before allowing the rest of the essay to be published in 1754.) But in the late 1760s, Franklin underwent a profound personal transformation. On a visit to London, he was disdained by the British elite and instead found company among Scots and Quakers. He was angered by descriptions of the American colonists in English newspapers as a “mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels, etc.” When Franklin returned to Philadelphia, he was a changed man. Not only had he come to see the colonies as having a separate identity from the mother country, but he now favored an inclusive approach to American citizenship. By 1783, Franklin was one of the strongest champions of open immigration: “ [E]very Man who comes…and takes up a piece of Land” added to the nation's strength.9

Franklin had come to believe that immigration would be the key to American success. The next two centuries would prove him right.

“CRAFTY” AMERICANS AND THE EARLY

BATTLE FOR EUROPE'S SKILLED LABOR

“[N]ature has given a right to all men,” Thomas Jefferson asserted in 1774, “[to leave] the country in which chance, not choice has placed them” and to seek out “new habitations.” Characteristically, Jefferson's declaration of natural right coincided with America's self-interest. After the Revolution, America was starved for labor, particularly for skilled workers and artisans who possessed the latest manufacturing know-how so critical to economic success. Unsurprisingly, the nations of Europe did not agree with Jefferson. As Doron Ben-Atar has shown in his book Trade Secrets, Europe struggled mightily to prevent emigration of skilled workers to newly independent America. For their part, Americans did everything they could to attract Europeans with technological expertise.

Massachusetts towns placed ads in English newspapers offering free land and wood for any immigrants willing to build and operate a mill. Entrepreneurial New Yorkers recruited thirteen of Sheffield's “best” ironworkers by offering them a “cash award” for emigrating: two years’ guaranteed salary and support payments for their family members who stayed back home. American recruiting agents scoured Europe in search of skilled laborers. In 1784, Connecticut's Wadsworth and Colt persuaded one hundred English textile workers to relocate to Hartford. The same year, a Baltimore entrepreneur brought back from Europe sixty-eight glassblowers from Germany and another fourteen from Holland.

The rivalry between the United States and Europe soon became cutthroat. Harsh laws were enacted in Europe prohibiting foreign recruitment. In 1788, for example, Thomas Philpot was imprisoned and fined five hundred pounds for inducing Irishmen to migrate to America. In England especially, anxiety mounted. An anti-emigration tract published in London in the 1790s avowed that “plenty of agents [were] hovering like birds of prey on the banks of the Thames, eager in their search for such artisans, mechanics, husbandmen, and labourers,