Transition

Moving to a new country can be difficult, but luckily the French-Canadian migrants did not do it alone. 72% of French-Canadian immigrants came to New England with their families, and another 18% came to join members of their immediate family who had previously made the journey. New arrivals commonly lived with extended family at first, although others would rent rooms in boarding houses, or stay in company-owned housing.

Factory life was a jarring shift from farm life. Life on the farm had been ruled by self-sufficiency and trade, where patterns of work were dictated by the sun and the seasons. French-Canadian farm families made everything they needed, such as milk, bread, cheese, sausage, and other products. Any surplus was marketed locally, or was bartered amongst friends and neighbors, allowing families to trade for goods they could not produce themselves.

In the industrial economy these immigrants encountered, in contrast, families were no longer self-sufficient. Instead, they worked for wages, which in turn were used to buy their food and clothes and other necessities. They had once owned the land they lived on, however meager; now, they had to pay rent to stay housed. Rather than being paid for goods they had produced on their own, families were instead paid for the hours they worked at machines they did not own. They no longer had control over the process or the products that they produced. The transition from an agrarian to industrial economy also meant families went from filling their homes with handmade furniture, clothing, and other goods, to purchasing these same essentials, now made with or by machines.

As mill workers, these immigrants’ lives were ruled by the clock, and by their bosses. Mill owners dictated everything, from how many hours their employees worked, and how much they were paid, to how fast the machines operated. To help the families make their way to the mills in the U S, many mill owners would pay for the necessary train tickets. However, the immigrants did not know that the cost of these tickets would be taken out of their future paychecks. Once the new immigrants got off the train, they often were given a basket of food, which was, unbeknownst to them, also a loan from the mill owners that would be deducted from their pay. After that, they had to rely on credit from the local grocer, butcher, etc. until they began to receive wages. 

For the first month, workers received a low apprentice salary. However, when workers began earning their full salary in their second month of employment, the company would immediately begin deducting money for the workers’ debts. In many cases, being paid for their work in the factories was the first time that these families had encountered money.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe and Asia as well as from Canada, either seeking a better life for themselves and their families (pull factor), escaping persecution (push factor), or some combination of both. Before the 1860s, immigrants came primarily from countries like Sweden, the British Isles, and Germany, with many moving to the Midwest. Catholic Irish immigrants faced particular violence and prejudice from native-born Protestants in the 1840s and 1850s, but were not specifically targeted by nativist laws.

At the turn of the century, immigrants were more likely to originate from Italy, Poland, Russia (and other parts of Eastern Europe), Greece, or Austria-Hungary. They came to and settled on the East Coast. Immigrants from China, Japan, and other Asian countries were more likely to arrive through Angel Island, just off the coast of San Francisco, and remain out West.

The relationship among immigrants to the United States, working-class native-born Americans, and capital is complicated. New arrivals frequently faced hostility from the native-born public because their cultures, languages, and religious practices were different from those of the largely native-born white Protestants.

Anti-Asian prejudice on the West Coast led to the ratification of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, which effectively ended Asian immigration to the United States. Meanwhile, quotas and other restrictions began to be enacted for the immigrant groups coming through Ellis Island. The 1917 immigration act created literacy tests and a tax for all incoming immigrants, followed by the 1921 Emergency Quota Act (which limited immigration from a given country in Europe to three percent of the total population that had already arrived as of the 1910 census) and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 (which limited annual immigration from Europe to just 150,000 people annually and lowered the quota from three to two percent, as of the 1890 census) 

However, immigrants were willing to work for lower wages than their native-born counterparts, making them attractive employees to factory owners and business interests. For example, the well-known writer and Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale, despite being an antislavery activist, held this ambivalent view of Irish immigrants, arguing that they be welcomed to the United States because “their inferiority as a race compels them to go to the bottom [of the occupational scale]” and “we are all … the higher lifted because they are here.” 

While many legal restrictions were focused on Asian and European immigrants, French Canadians were also subject to prejudice and discrimination while also being sought-after workers by industry owners. According to a Massachusetts labor report from 1881, “the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern states. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational. They do not come to … dwell with us as citizens … they are a horde of industrial invaders … These people have one good trait. They are indefatigable workers and docile”.

In 1875, the Québec government passed the Repatriation Act, which allotted between $60,000 and $80,000 to bring French Canadians back to Canada. The Canadian government created pamphlets to be distributed in New England's French-Canadian cities and towns to encourage them to return. Catholic priests, such as Curé Antoine Labelle, were hired to preach in French-Canadian parishes throughout the region to persuade families to return to Canada. 

The Québec government also asked journalists, such as Ferdinand Gagnon of the Worcester and Woonsocket paper, Le Travailleur, to write favorably about repatriation. In September 1871, for example, he wrote that French Canadians would become “the pale shadow of a people” if they stayed in the United States. Initially, Gagnon was quite successful at getting struggling factory workers to return to Québec, but by the 1880s the United States economy began to grow, and half of the families that had moved to Québec returned to New England and factory life.