Immigration remains crucial for American society and has always taken part in the nation’s history. It is a significant event because people keep moving from one country to another, and many technological innovations, companies, or industries could not exist without immigrants who left their homes searching for a better life. History includes multiple occasions of massive settlers’ appearance, such as the Irish coming to the United States in the nineteenth century in their attempts to escape poverty and disease experienced in their homeland.
Massive immigration and assimilation of the Irish through the nineteenth century is a subject of many studies because it affected all spheres from cultural to economic. The newcomers arrived in the period of rapidly developing Market Revolution when the need for a workforce was especially strong. Most of the Irish settled in New York because they reached the city’s ports and had no money to move to other places (Wegge et al., 2017). These people agreed to get jobs with any conditions and low wages, therefore they quickly became the cheapest and preferred workforce (Wegge et al., 2017). They lacked skills necessary for manufactures’ labor, but they knew English and thus were capable of being instructed.
In the 1840-1860s, New York profoundly increased the number of factories and other productions, moving the economy to steady development. The Irish immigrants’ workforce was applied in many manufacturers, which affected the overall labor conditions standards that affected all citizens. However, the absence of a cheaper force could prevent New York’s economy from progressing significantly. This essay aims to discuss that although economic scholars argued that Irish immigrants worsened labor conditions for citizens, further research shows that newcomers profoundly influenced the Market Revolution in New York of the 1840-1860s.
Reference
Wegge, S. A., Anbinder, T., & Ó Gráda, C. (2017). Immigrants and savers: A rich new database on the Irish in 1850s New York. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 50(3), 144-155. Web.