Gilded Age Americans priced each immigrant at 800 to 1,500 of national wealth

Evidence

The general public shared the businessman’s inclination to evaluate the newcomers in tangibly economic terms. There were elaborate calculations (how characteristic of the Gilded Age!) putting a price tag on immigrants in order to fix their per capita contribution to national wealth. Statisticians of the United States ‘Treasury Department settled upon 800 as the average monetary value of an immigrant. Amateur mathematicians showed less restraint. One valued immigrants at 1,000 apiece on the ground that each was worth twice as much as an ante-bellum slave. Andrew Carnegie raised the estimate to $1,500. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 102

Categorization

• CANDY: A live fact worth telling: the US Treasury valued an immigrant at 800, and Carnegie at 1,500 — literally pricing people like antebellum slaves.
• XREF: connects to: Railroads and speculators actively manufactured the immigrant influx through paid European propaganda — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 98

Broader Connections

• Railroads and speculators actively manufactured the immigrant influx through paid European propaganda #corroborates (0.72) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 98