This historical essay aims to discuss the thesis that although most scholars of the American economy have argued that Irish immigrants worsened labor conditions for citizens, further research shows that in New York of the 1840-1860s, newcomers profoundly influenced the Market Revolution.” While the newcomers were one of New York’s society’s poorest segments, lacked crucial skills and education, their impact on the city’s economic development was considerable.
Multiple causes led the Irish to come to New York and become its crucial wheel in the manufacturers’ improvement. The immigrants left their homeland in an attempt to escape poverty and Famine disease that was the immediate reason to move, and New York’s ports were their arrival point (Hirota, 2020). Most of them did not have enough money to settle in other American cities, and New York contained many significant manufacturers like cotton factories, and the workforce was in demand (The American Yawp, 2021). These were the reasons for the Irish immigrants to stay in the city and contribute to its economic development by involving men, women, and even children to work. During the two decades between the 1840s and 1860, the percentage of newcomers became so huge that the natives lost their potential jobs, raised the labor conflicts, and enforced racial discrimination in employment (Bulik, 2015). Their arrival to New York in the middle of the nineteenth century provided the city with a cheap workforce, and therefore influenced its economy.
One of the immediate consequences of the Irish immigrants’ influence on New York’s economy is their impact on the draft riots of 1863. The newcomers were the significant piece of the city’s poor part of the population, and the new Congress’s laws put them into even worse conditions. Moreover, the fact that New York was overcrowded with a workforce mostly contained from the Irish or German immigrants was the cause of these riots. The long-term consequence of the migrants’ contribution to New York’s economic development is the change in labor conditions setting on local and legislative levels. American society reviewed the importance of education and experience, and the example of working Irish women led to changes in gender roles’ perception. The 1850s newspapers’ employment advertisements where the natives search for a girl to get a job and require their candidates to be non-Irish is the historical evidence to the immigrants’ impact (Bulk, 2015). The immigrants who lacked the urban skills to work on manufactures were beneficial for New York’s factories that required many people for low wages.
References
Bulik, Mark (2015). 1854: No Irish need apply. The New York Times. Web.
Hirota, H. (2020). Limits of intolerance: nativism and immigration control in nineteenth-century New York. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-17. Web.
The American Yawp. (n.d.). Market Revolution. Web.