"Historians have sometimes asserted or assumed that the bulk of immigrants were unskilled. Handlin (1951/1973:58, 60) in the classic history of immigration to America, The Uprooted, described immigrants as "peasants," people who lacked training for merchandising and the skills to pursue a craft. This view also appears in some surveys of American history. The textbook by Nash et al. (1986:604), for example, reports that "most immigrants" after the Civil War "had few skills." Cliometric investigation suggests a quite different story. Available evidence implies that skill differences between native- and foreign-born workers throughout the period of mass immigration were small or nonexistent and that the relative quality of immigrants did not fall over time."
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pp.309-310
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States
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Immigration to the United States
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