The Rising Tide of Transient Labor
A federal report highlights the growing reliance on Mexican migrant workers in the American West and the social shifts it triggers.
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.
Mexican labor in the United States is the subject of an article by Dr. Victor S. Clark, in Bulletin No. 78 of the Bureau of Labor. Within less than a decade, there has been a large increase in the amount of Mexican labor employed in the United States, but even more marked has been the increasing range of its distribution. As recently as 1900, immigrant Mexicans were seldom found more than a hundred miles from the border. Now they are working as unskilled laborers as far east as Chicago and as far north as Iowa, Wyoming, and San Francisco. In some occupations, Mexicans are rapidly displacing Japanese, Greeks, and even Italians. The majority of the immigrants are transient laborers who seldom remain more than six months at a time in the United States. Brought from the farms and mines to work upon the railways of northern Mexico, the laborer, drawn by the higher wage paid in the United States, is easily attracted across the border. As the Mexican immigrant does the lowest grade work at the lowest wages, he has not come to be regarded with any well-defined race prejudice, as his economic competition is not with the American, but between him and the Italian, the Greek, and the Japanese.
“They work and are contented in the desert where Europeans and Orientals become dissatisfied or are unable to withstand the climate.”
This 1909 report captures the early history of the agricultural and industrial labor pipelines that built the modern West. It echoes current political and economic debates regarding the necessity of immigrant labor versus the systemic exploitation of those same transient populations.
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