Early American industrial labor was overwhelmingly foreign-born

Evidence

One central fact about the American working class in this period, and during subsequent decades, too, must be remembered: it was largely composed of immigrants. The working force in the steel mills, the coal mines, the textile factories, the clothing shop was overwhelmingly foreign-born, and that part of it that was not was concentrated in supervisory jobs and in the more highly paid skilled occupations. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 988

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Railroads and speculators actively manufactured the immigrant influx through paid European propaganda — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 98; Immigration and the cash nexus created America’s wage-labor force — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 613