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Content: Immigration and Nativism
The economic changes of industrialization created a concentration of wealth and distinctive new middle and working classes. The need for cheap labor invited unprecedented waves of immigrants in the 1840s and 50s, particularly those fleeing from the
                                    potato famine in impoverished Ireland. The willingness of these people to work for low wages eventually convinced the factory
                                    managers, like those at the Lowell Mills, to replace its local labor with chiefly immigrant labor by the 1860s. The Irish
                                    served as the primary labor force in the construction of infrastructure like the Erie Canal as well. The second largest group
                                    to immigrate to the United States before the Civil War was the Germans. German immigrants, while also poor, differed from
                                    the Irish in that they had money to buy land, settled largely in the west, and for the most part were skilled artisans. The influx of immigrants prompted a reaction known as "Nativism." Nativists suspected immigrants of threatening the rights
                                    of "native-born" Americans, embodied such discriminatory views of the Irish that they rivaled the racism reserved for free
                                    blacks in northern society. The two groups-the Irish and free blacks-often competed for the lowest-paying jobs in the industrial
                                    North. Many prominent people of the day observed that working conditions for immigrants in the North, although based on the
                                    "free labor" ideology, were just as deplorable as those of the slaves.