Who Are America's Workers?
Immigrant workers and German indentured servants, 1737
On March 8, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Texas and twenty-one other states challenging the Biden administration’s use of parole authority to temporarily admit Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans (“CHNV parole”). The court held that the states lacked standing to bring the challenge. The states did not dispute that since the initiation of the program, the number of nationals of those countries entering the United States had drastically decreased, by as much as 44 percent. Given those declines, the court denied that the states had suffered their alleged injuries in the form of costs for healthcare, education, and law enforcement. The states appealed the ruling on March 14. (A similar argument about abuse of the parole authority at the southern border underpinned the House’s allegations in its vote to impeach Secretary Anthony Mayorkas in February.)
There’s no question that the Department of Homeland Security has the power to allow anyone to physically enter the country for a short period. Section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides that the Secretary may “in his discretion parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit any alien applying for admission to the United States ….” When DHS believes the purpose of the parole has ended, it must treat the person as an applicant for lawful admission.
Who Are America’s Workers?
The states’ objections to parole, at least in the CHNV program, have less to do with their provision of public services (which they couldn’t show) and more to do with a benefit that accompanies parole: work authorization.
The conservative Center for Immigration Studies has argued, “Make no mistake, it is the near guarantee of release into the interior of the country via parole, coupled with immediate or near immediate eligibility for work authorization that are the strongest pull-factors fueling the crisis on the southern border.”
At the same time, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. currently has 9.5 million job openings and only 6.5 million unemployed workers. There are many jobs American workers won’t take: For example, 49% of American workers say they would not take a job that doesn’t allow opportunities for remote work. Some dispute that this constitutes a “labor shortage,” arguing that the real problem is Americans’ defensible lack of interest in taking relatively low-paying jobs in the hospitality and retail sectors. Companies like Nexa Workforce offer to help employers fill these unskilled jobs through employment-based immigration applications (for a fee, of course). Many employers can’t afford the fees and waiting periods, and not all jobs or employees would qualify anyway.
The Immigration of America’s Workers, 18th Century
In the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, employers in the British colonies in North America had the same problem. In Pennsylvania, for example, there just weren’t enough longtime colonists to fill jobs in shops, farms, trades, and households.
So in late summer and early fall, hundreds of colonists would gather on the docks of Philadelphia, eager to bid on the labor of the healthiest new arrivals. A man, woman, or couple might serve for three to five years, depending on the debt they owed to the ship captain; a child would serve up to the age of 21 in exchange for their upbringing. When the newcomer finished their service, the master had to provide them a new suit of clothes in which to take their leave.
In the early eighteenth century, this “redemption” system served as a form of credit for people seeking to escape the feudal obligations and near-constant warfare in southwest Germany. The ancestor of my biography subject, State Department official Wilbur J. Carr, emigrated from the state of Württemberg in southwest Germany to Pennsylvania in 1737, so lately I’ve been exploring the “country conditions” and immigrant journeys of Germans in that era. As always, I’m struck by how much has stayed the same.
In the seventeenth century, German-speaking immigrants had often been religious minorities and arrived as groups, with the pastor or leader making travel arrangements and the group paying their own way. A few wealthier individuals who could afford to pay full fare followed. But as the Pennsylvania colony grew and the demand for unskilled labor increased, ship masters and captains began a new practice: accepting a certain number of poorer passengers on credit.
At first, the passengers’ debts were usually paid by relatives or friends who awaited their arrival, or were eventually made good by passengers allowed to depart with an IOU. Most of those IOUs went uncollected, however. Rather than incur the costs of collections and bad debt, captains increasingly relied on local employers to redeem the debts in exchange for indentured servitude.
The docks became an auction house on the days the ships came in. By the time the ships had been inspected and male immigrants had taken oaths of allegiance and abjuration at the court house, dozens or hundreds of potential employers waited on the docks to board ship and bid on those they thought would make the best workers. Passengers who owed debts had a few days to canvas any relatives, friends, or neighbors from the old country who might help pay them off. Those who failed often had little choice but to put themselves up for indenture. (You can read more about German emigrant journeys, including redemption, in Mariane Wokeck’s Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America or in Aaron Fogleman’s Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775.)
Tales of Indenture: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In 1756, a Württemberg church organist who had traveled to Pennsylvania and back wrote a diatribe on the perils of emigration (which was dedicated to and published by the Duke of Württemberg in order to discourage people from leaving). In his pamphlet, Gottlieb Mittelberger described the horrors of the “redemption” system:
The sale of human beings in the market on board the ship is carried on thus: Every day Englishmen, Dutchmen and High-German people come from the city of Philadelphia and other places, in part from a great distance, say 20, 30, or 40 hours away, and go on board the newly arrived ship that has brought and offers for sale passengers from Europe, and select among the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for their business, and bargain with them how they will serve for their passage money, which most of them are still in debt for. When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adult persons bind themselves in writing to serve 3, 4, 5 or 6 years for the amount due by them, according to their age and strength. But very young people, from 10 to 15 years, must serve till they are 21 years old.
If the possibility of long indenture weren’t frightening enough, Mittelberger stressed the possibility of what we now call “family separation”:
Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle; for if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained; but as the parents often do not know where and to what people their children are going, it often happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in all their lives.
While Mittelberger’s pamphlet emphasized the worst, it was based in truth. In Hopeful Journeys, Fogleman describes a woman named Maria Barbara Kober who arrived in Philadelphia from her native Schwaigern in 1738. Kober’s trip began in tragedy. She left Schwaigern with her husband and baby boy, Johann Michl, but the child died during the journey. She and her husband arrived in debt. The captain gave them three weeks to search for someone to pay their debts while they lived on board the ship, but they came up empty.
At her husband’s suggestion, Kober placed herself up for indenture for six years with an “Englische” who lived twenty-six miles from Philadelphia. In 1744, she had paid her debt and came back to Philadelphia to look for her husband. She did not find him; decades later, when she wrote home to her family, she still did not know that he had died shortly after their arrival in Philadelphia. With no prospects in Philadelphia, she returned to the family she had served and stayed with them for another twenty-three years. She finally married another German immigrant in 1761 and moved to Philadelphia to be near other Germans.
Not all indentures proved tragic, however. The same ship that brought Carr’s ancestor, Hans Michel Finter, to Philadelphia on October 5, 1737, also brought a boy named Franz Clewell and his family. The Clewells were French Huguenots who had fled persecution of Protestants in France two generations earlier and settled in Auerbach, a town in Baden-Durlach in southwest Germany. Franz Clewell’s father died in 1730 when Franz was ten years old, and his mother remarried a Swiss man, Johannes Gefeller. After the region once again became occupied by French soldiers during the War of the Polish Succession (1733-35), the family decided to emigrate to North America.
They must have paid their way on credit, because Franz, just barely seventeen on the day of their arrival, was immediately indentured for five years. Franz later recorded his memories of immigration and redemption for his Moravian church in Shoeneck, Pennsylvania, and they were later published a family history. He recalled:
On our arrival in the vessel, mv dear mother handed me over to my future master, and she begged him earnestly to see to it, that I attended church regularly, as well as attend to my private devotions and admonished me to continue in the fear of the Lord and trust his aid and assistance.
In the home of my master in the vicinity of Oley, Pennsylvania, during the five years of my service, I fared remarkably well but there was little opportunity to attend religious services anywhere as my dear mother had requested, because at that time there was no church far or near. It happened on one occasion while out on business for my master that I passed a house where there was a large gathering of people so that many had to stand, on the outside; thinking that it was a public sale, I rode up and tied my horse and forced myself in, but soon realized my mistake. From the little that I could catch I inferred that it was a Roman Catholic Seminary. On reaching home, I inquired further of my master about it. He informed me that they were "Herrnhuter" Moravians, who, a short time ago, came to this country and preached a new doctrine. This aroused my curiosity in what this new doctrine consisted and I found that it was the same to which my sainted father held fast and in which he instructed me. The doctrine of the merits of His atoning death. The teaching of these precious, saving truths had already made a deep impression on my heart and served as a good seed in my heart while through the grace of God and the mercy of the Lord, they sprang up in due time and bore fruit.
Support Free Public Scholarship
Big Publishing shouldn’t control access to informed and thoughtful scholarship on important subjects like immigration. If you found this post helpful, please consider subscribing to support public scholarship on Substack. Your subscription is free and helps to spread a different kind of conversation about immigration policy today.