Immigration, labour & the making of modern America

The Great Waves

Between 1820 and 1924 roughly 36 million immigrants entered the United States, transforming a largely Anglo-Protestant, agrarian republic into an industrial, polyglot nation. The first major wave (1840s-1850s) was dominated by Irish Catholics fleeing the Great Famine (1845-52) and Germans displaced after the failed 1848 revolutions. This influx triggered the first organized nativist reaction: the American (Know-Nothing) Party, which peaked in the 1854-56 elections demanding a 21-year naturalization waiting period.

The second wave (1880s-1924), the "new immigration," came overwhelmingly from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Poles, Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Slavs, and Greeks—processed after 1892 through Ellis Island in New York Harbor. On the West Coast, Chinese laborers recruited to build the Central Pacific Railroad arrived through Angel Island (opened 1910).

The Architecture of Exclusion

Restriction tracked nativist anxiety. The Page Act of 1875 barred Chinese women presumed to be prostitutes; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (signed by Chester A. Arthur, 6 May 1882) was the first federal law to bar a national group by name and was made permanent in 1902. The Immigration Act of 1917 created an "Asiatic Barred Zone" and imposed a literacy test over Woodrow Wilson's veto.

The statutory climax was quota-based national-origins restriction. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped immigration at 3% of each nationality's 1910 census population; the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) tightened this to 2% of the 1890 census—deliberately chosen to favor northern and western Europeans—and excluded "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (Asians) entirely. Mexican immigration was left unrestricted to supply Southwestern agriculture, then reversed during the Depression-era "Mexican Repatriation" (1929-36).

Supreme Court Markers

Three decisions anchor citizenship doctrine. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) affirmed birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment for a child born on US soil to Chinese parents. Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) denied naturalization to Japanese and Indian applicants respectively, holding them not "free white persons" under the 1790 Naturalization Act.

The restrictionist edifice fell only with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), signed by Lyndon Johnson at the Statue of Liberty on 3 October 1965, which abolished national-origins quotas in favor of hemispheric caps emphasizing family reunification and skills—reshaping the demographic future of the nation toward Asia and Latin America. Candidates should grasp this arc: the United States built its industrial labor force on open immigration, slammed the gate shut by race and origin between 1882 and 1924, and reopened it on new terms in 1965.

Capital, Labour, and Bloodshed

Industrialization concentrated workers in factories, mines, and railroads under brutal conditions, producing a militant but fractured labor movement. The National Labor Union (1866) and the Knights of Labor (founded 1869, peaking near 700,000 members in 1886 under Terence Powderly) sought broad reform but collapsed after being blamed for the Haymarket affair (4 May 1886, Chicago), where a bomb killed police during a rally for the eight-hour day.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded 1886 under Samuel Gompers, succeeded by abandoning utopian reform for "pure and simple unionism"—organizing skilled craft workers around wages, hours, and conditions. Major confrontations defined the era: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; the Homestead Strike of 1892 at Carnegie's steel works, where Pinkerton agents battled workers; and the Pullman Strike of 1894, broken when President Cleveland deployed federal troops and the Supreme Court upheld an injunction against Eugene Debs in In re Debs (1895).

Radicals and Reform

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, "Wobblies"), founded 1905, organized unskilled and immigrant workers across industries and led the 1912 Lawrence "Bread and Roses" textile strike. State violence persisted: the Ludlow Massacre (20 April 1914) saw Colorado National Guardsmen kill striking miners and their families at a Rockefeller-owned coal operation.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (25 March 1911) killed 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, and catalyzed Progressive workplace-safety legislation and the rise of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

The New Deal Settlement

Federal law finally protected collective bargaining. The Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932) curtailed anti-union injunctions; the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 guaranteed the right to organize and created the National Labor Relations Board, upheld in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel (1937). The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the minimum wage, the 40-hour week, and child-labor limits. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), formed in 1935 under John L. Lewis, organized mass-production industries through tactics like the Flint sit-down strike (1936-37) against General Motors.

The pendulum swung back with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which banned closed shops, permitted state right-to-work laws, and required anti-communist affidavits. The AFL and CIO merged in 1955 under George Meany. This trajectory—from injunction and bayonet to statutory protection and then partial rollback—is the spine of US labor history the FSOT expects you to command.

Why This Matters for the Exam

The FSOT's US History, Society, and Culture component tests immigration and labor as the connective tissue between the Gilded Age, the Progressive era, and the New Deal—precisely the periods that fill the multiple-choice job-knowledge section. Examiners favor this material because it links statutes, court cases, demographic data, and presidential action in causal chains, and because it underpins the diplomat's ability to explain American identity, pluralism, and political economy to foreign audiences in public-diplomacy settings.

What Gets Tested

Expect discrete factual items: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as the first race-based federal exclusion; the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and its national-origins quota mechanism; the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as the pivot to modern demographics. On labor, retain the AFL/Gompers craft model versus the CIO/Lewis industrial model, the Wagner Act (1935) as the charter of collective bargaining, and Taft-Hartley (1947) as the conservative counter-reform. Pair each landmark with its case: Wong Kim Ark (1898) for birthright citizenship, In re Debs (1895) for the labor injunction, NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin (1937) for the constitutionality of the Wagner Act.

How to Answer

The Structured Interview and any essay-style prompt reward synthesis: connect open immigration to industrial labor supply, nativism to restriction, and the Depression to the New Deal labor settlement. High-yield retention items—memorize the dates: 1882, 1911, 1917, 1924, 1935, 1938, 1947, 1955, 1965. A strong candidate can narrate how the United States simultaneously imported labor and policed who could become an American, and how that tension persists in contemporary policy debates over immigration reform and union revival.