Famine-era Irish immigrants were poorer and entered as unskilled laborers.

Evidence

Part of the explanation is to be found in the change in the character of immigration brought about by the Famine. As the historian Kirby Miller notes, the 1.8 million immigrants who came in the decade 1845–1855 were as a rule poorer than those who had come earlier, and the majority of males among them probably worked at least temporarily as canal, railroad, building-construction, or dock laborers. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 142

Categorization

• SHARE: Would interest someone studying labor history or the mechanics of how immigrant waves displace earlier cohorts into the unskilled market.
• XREF: connects to: Pioneer settlers lived in grinding poverty without basic comforts or proper clothing. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 67; America recruited displaced Irish as its unskilled labor force — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 137; Pre-Famine Irish emigration was neither uniformly poor nor uniformly English-speaking — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 138 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Irish immigrants supplied Western Europe’s cheapest industrial labor #expands (0.82) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 254
• Industrialized economies deliberately produce a disadvantaged immigrant underclass for menial labor #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2586
• Industrialized nations manufacture an unassimilated ethnic underclass to fill menial jobs #expands (0.79)
• Early Irish immigrants worked in conditions resembling slave labor #expands (0.76) — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 33