Italian Immigration
to New York
Joe Giordano
Southern
Italians were eighty percent of the immigrants to New York where their labor
was needed for growing commercial and industrial activities in Manhattan. The
majority were general laborers. Those who had skills were merchants,
stonecutters, mechanics, mariners, masons, barbers, seamstresses and
shoemakers. Women most often worked in the garment industry. Italian
immigration was composed principally of poor people who hadn’t enough money to
pay transportation expenses from the ports of disembarkation, and therefore had
to find work immediately. That's why the padrone
system of employment was accepted.
Padroni generally were labor agents who sold jobs to men eager to migrate.
Many padroni were sub-contractors
building railroads, tunnels, and canals with crews of migrant laborers. While
immigrants were often preyed upon by other Italians and relegated to the lowest
economic tier, a comparison of wages in Italy versus America demonstrates that
despite the cost of travel and the cut of the padrone, Italians earned far more money in the States than in Italy.
Furthermore, in Italy patron-client relationships weren't viewed as a limit on
individual liberty. On the contrary, patronage was an integral dimension of
Italian life at every level of society. While patronage corrupted Italy’s
government, Italians viewed a patron relationship as an advantage and those
without patrons as truly powerless.
The
early literature on Italian immigration to New York emphasizes the squalor of
their living conditions. While this is undoubtedly true, something about
Italian life in New York eventually stemmed the tendency to repatriate to Italy
and attracted people to remain in the United States. Italians often immigrated
to where kin, friends and neighbors had settled, familiar social networks.
Factories transformed Italians from agricultural peasants into wage-earners.
Southern Italian work ethic and belief in family encountered a degree of
economic mobility and city-life social interactions not available to most of the
men or women in the agricultural orientated villages they
left. This new economic and social order was attractive. Eventually a critical
mass of Italians from the same village, same area or same kin had come to New
York, and more men began to immigrate with wives and children. Italians adopted
the United States as a permanent home.
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