Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably
between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and
often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants
primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that
failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants
might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and
employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that
sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged
established political and economic power structures, immigrant
laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New
South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded
immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their
purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant
laborers acted independently. Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident
Strangers restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history
of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant
groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama.
Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national
newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct
the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups
she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records,
including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others.
Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South
boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of
immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around
the world arrived in industries and communities across the state,
especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham.
Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and
individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted
labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also
presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at
work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant
laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of
empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global
networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.
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