The Economic Anxiety of the 1888 Seattle Labor Market
A century and a half ago, Seattle’s labor leaders were already wrestling with the volatile intersection of rapid immigration, wage standards, and protectionist sentiment.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The report of the congressional committee appointed to investigate the question of immigration will be an interesting document, for it will deal with a subject which is year by year becoming of more vital importance to every wage-earner in the United States. It is to be hoped that the investigation will be a non-political and honest one. The conditions to be taken into consideration are not what they were forty years ago. Then the investigation might have been to ascertain whether we were receiving enough immigrants to build up the country. Now it is intended to ascertain whether we are not receiving too many. The question, then, is an economic one. When the nation was in its infancy, and non-productive, the power of English, Irish, Scotch, German and Scandinavian people to command was truly great. They were mechanics, tradesmen, skilled workers, who built the nation's industry. But today, the flow of immigration is with unskilled Italians, Poles, Hungarians, all of an inferior class, driven to our shores by want and misery. They do not come to build up the country; they come to make up the great mass of the thousand-year-starving in our city slums on the seaboard. They are here free and unfettered as their predecessors. On the contrary, the life of the workingman is being made hard and fast to compete with this through whom you have to get over, to receive permission to enter into a nation which can but heighten our own wage standard of labor. There is a law of our labor force coming back to the state that was not before—a law which is to conform to the higher state of civilization of our working classes.
“The conditions to be taken into consideration are not what they were forty years ago. Then the investigation might have been to ascertain whether we were receiving enough immigrants to build up the country. Now it is intended to ascertain whether we are not receiving too many.”
This 1888 editorial captures the era's raw, exclusionary labor anxieties, echoing the same intense debates over global migration and wage stagnation that currently define Seattle's political landscape. It highlights how quickly 'pro-growth' immigrant policies in the 19th century shifted toward protectionist labor rhetoric as Seattle’s population boomed.
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