Employers
"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, waves of immigrants flooded into the United States. These new immigrants swelled the workforce. City dwellers provided a massive pool of cheap labor"– Gale Student Resources in Context, 2016. [1\
Employers, such as textile or steel mill factory owners, relied on a steady source of immigrant labor because immigrants didn't typically demand wage increases and were willing to work in unappealing, often unsanitary conditions, making them a convenient and profitable labor source.
"So far as concerns national economics, it would seem that the exclusion of the unskilled would strike a heavy blow at the nation's prosperity and thus injure the great body of our skilled works. The common laborer is not commonly his competitor. A reason why the wages of skilled labor are high in this country is that tasks which demand only muscle have heretofore been largely done by the newly arrived immigrant while the unskilled are kept out will scarcely improve the lot of members of trade unions. This fact is more realized in trade union circles than formerly. - The Washington Post, 1920. [2\ |
"Judge [Elbert Henry\ Gary, head of the United States Steel Corporation, announced bitterly at a stockholders' meeting: the present [1921 immigration act\ law is "one of the worst things that this country has ever done for itself economically."
– John Higham, Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism, 2002. [3\