hand, was "pulled" to America to avoid a looming financial disaster in their nation. Unlike the Irish, the German immigrants often sold their possessions and arrived in America with money in hand. German immigrants were both Protestant and Catholic, although the latter did not face the discrimination that the Irish did. Many Germans settled in communities in the Midwest rather than on the coast. Major cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio and St. Louis, Missouri developed large German populations. Unlike the Irish, most German immigrants were educated, middle-class people who mainly came to America for political rather than economic reasons. In the big cities such as New York, immigrants often lived in ethnic enclavess called "ghettos" that were often impoverished and crime-ridden. The most infamous of these immigrant neighborhoods was the Five Points in New York City. With increasing labor agitation for higher wages and better working conditions, such as by the Lowell mill girls in Massachusetts, many factory owners began to replace female workers with immigrants who would work cheaper and were less demanding about factory conditions. Political upheaval Wilmot Proviso In 1848 the acquisition of new territory from Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo renewed the sectional debate over slavery. The question of whether the new territory would allow slavery was the main question, with Northern Congressmen hoping to limit slavery and Southern Congressmen hoping to expand the territory in which it was legal. Soon after the war began, Democratic Congressman David Wilmot proposed that territory won from Mexico should be free from the institution of slavery. Called the Wilmot Proviso, the measure failed to pass Congress and thus never became law. This served to unify the majority of Southerners, who saw the Proviso as an attack on their society and their Constitutional Rights. The Popular Sovereignty Debate With the failure of the Wilmot Proviso, Senator Lewis Cass introduced the idea of popular sovereignty in Congress. In an attempt to hold the Congress together as it continued to divide along sectional rather than party lines, Cass proposed that Congress did not have the power to determine whether territories could allow slavery, since this was not an enumerated power listed in the Constitution. Instead, Cass proposed that the people living in the territories themselves should decide the slavery issue. For the Democrats, the solution was not as clear as it appeared. Northern Democrats called for "squatter sovereignty", in which