Clash of Cultures & the Discovery of Gold      123456

A New Source of Labor

Industry in the United States continued to grow during and after the First World War and with it came the need for large numbers of workers. But war and the subsequent restrictive immigration laws limited the number of immigrants who might previously have filled those jobs. Industry needed a new source of labor.

African Americans

Pushed out of the South by white racism and enticed by advertisements for jobs in the North, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated to cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. Although their numbers were few, African Americans also moved west to California during these years.

Filipinos and Mexicans

Other great internal migrations of the era are less well known. One example is the migration of Filipinos to California. The Philippines was a territory of the U.S. from 1898 to 1945. As American colonial subjects, Filipinos were considered by law to be U.S. nationals, which gave them the right to move freely within the U.S. and its territories. After the 1924 Immigration Act put and end to the immigration of agricultural laborers from Japan and India, industrial farmers in California needed a new labor force. Filipinos filled these jobs by the thousands. By 1930 nearly 56,000 Filipinos resided on the West Coast, mostly in California.

The 1910s and 1920s also marked a major surge in the immigration of Mexicans to the United States. Although for many the move was temporary and solely work-related, many others decided to move their families to border states such as California and settle permanently. Between 1910 and 1930, the official census figures show the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. increasing from 200,000 to 600,000. The real number of Mexicans living in the U.S., however, was certainly much higher.