Immigration and the cash nexus created America’s wage-labor force
Evidence
Ensuring the conditions for rapid capital accumulation— an adequate and cheap labor supply— in a land-abundant and labor-scarce continent was no simple task. Slavery and indentured servitude were but one solu tion. The development of a well-functioning labor market required huge influxes of immigrants: before the Civil War, Northern Europeans of Irish, German, English, Scotch, and Scandanavian stock, and later on, Eastern and Southern Europeans. Since the Civil War, also, the continual erosion of labor-intensive single-family farming in agriculture and the encroach ment of the “cash nexus” on the household has added millions of workers — black and white, male and female— to the wage-labor force. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 613
Categorization
- QUESTION: The claim that immigration plus household-cash-nexus erosion produced the labor force ties to gender history — women entering wage labor through the breakdown of household production is undersold here.
- XREF: connects to: Global capital concentration in cities creates the very low-wage immigrant labor it then hosts — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 285; Colonial indenture formalized the transnational labor market and legal-illegal categories; Immigration is driven by employer demand for low-wage labor, not migrant choice — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3832 (+12 more)
Broader Connections
- Global capital concentration in cities creates the very low-wage immigrant labor it then hosts
#expands(0.82) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 285 - Free wage labor was not the basis of early American capitalist development
#contradicts(0.82) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 612 - Early American industrial labor was overwhelmingly foreign-born
#exemplifies(0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 988 - Immigration is driven by employer demand for low-wage labor, not migrant choice
#expands(0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3832 - Dual labor market theory frames migration as demand-driven by employers
#expands(0.78) - Colonial indenture formalized the transnational labor market and legal-illegal categories
#qualifies(0.75) - Formalizing the labor market institutionalized coercion into a migration industry
#expands(0.75) - Differential incorporation of labor sectors systematically coincides with racist and ethnic segmentary features
#expands(0.75) - Industrialized economies deliberately produce a disadvantaged immigrant underclass for menial labor
#expands(0.74) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2586 - Immigrant labor fills unskilled work while natives hold direction and skilled trades
#exemplifies(0.74) - States profit from the illegality they co-produce in migrant labor flows
#expands(0.74) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 666 - Neoclassical economics frames migration as wage-differential market choice
#contradicts(0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3830 - The cash economy correlates social expansion with individual differentiation
#complicates(0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 663 - Preindustrial cities depended on immigrant labor and skills for their growth
#exemplifies(0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1521 - American immigrant workers aspired to become capitalists rather than a laboring class
#qualifies(0.72)