In the mid-19th century, some Americans criticized immigrant workers for threatening their employment by working at extremely low wages. U.S. workers’ opposition to immigrant labor became particularly strong during the 1870s and 1880s in response to the growth of industrial capitalism after the Civil War. At that time, U.S. workers suffered exploitative labor practices and the decline of wages, while the industrial and commercial elite enjoyed the extreme concentration of wealth. These situations provoked radical labor activism. Many labor leaders viewed immigrants employed by capitalists at low wages as advancing the unequal distribution of wealth and contributing to the impoverishment of U.S. workers.
Organized labor directed its harshest criticism against foreign contract workers, who were believed to be imported by capitalists as strikebreakers. Some employers did import immigrants as strikebreakers directly from Europe, but this practice was relatively rare. Many, if not most, foreign-born workers employed as strikebreakers immigrated to the U.S. on their own and were later hired by employers. Also, imported immigrants were not necessarily unskilled laborers; they included skilled workers, such as window glass workers. Nevertheless, opponents of contract workers claimed that capitalists conducted large-scale importations of “ignorant, servile, unskilled, and debased labor,” or “‘pauper labor’ of Europe.”
Negative sentiment against contract laborers led to President Chester A. Arthur signing a bill that became known as the Foran Act on February 26, 1885. The Foran Act, also called the “alien contract labor law,” was named after its sponsor, Martin A. Foran, a former labor leader and a U.S. representative from Ohio. The act prohibited individuals and companies from prepaying, assisting, or encouraging the immigration of contract workers—in other words, foreigners immigrating under contracts or agreements to work in the United States and its territories. The law soon was amended in 1888 to begin deporting foreign contract workers already in the country.
In 1891, Congress went a step further by integrating these restrictions on contract workers into general immigration law, which administered the entry and removal of all foreigners, except the Chinese, whose immigration was restricted by Chinese exclusion laws. The Immigration Act of 1891 added contract workers to the list of prohibited groups of foreigners, including people likely to become public charges, people with contagious diseases, people with mental illness, and criminals.