Page:Slavs on southern farms (1914).pdf/9



Already the native skilled and unskilled labor supply of the South is practically exhausted. In all sections mill, foundry, factory, and mine owners are clamoring for labor. This widespread industrial and commercial expansion which is taking place in the South has tended to depopulate our agricultural regions, and agricultural labor has become a serious problem in many communities.

The erection of iron and steel plants, sugar refineries, tobacco factories, railroad, power, and lighting plants, chemical and woodworking establishments, and the development of coal and iron mining has attracted the native white farmers and mountaineers from the small farms and remote rural districts to the industrial centers. The resulting urban development has also lured the negroes from the country to the cities, where they are annually growing less efficient as a dependable labor supply.

These sources are now no longer adequate to meet the rapidly increasing demands for industrial labor. In addition to this, the migration of the poor whites and negroes from the farms to the industrial communities and cities has, to a large extent, prevented an agricultural development commensurate with the industrial expansion.

While the poor whites have been more or less successful in the cotton mills and other industrial establishments and every indication is that they will in time become skilled workers, the negroes have proven a failure as industrial laborers, except in the coal and iron mines and in the roughest kinds of construction work. Realizing this, a few southern manufacturers have begun to encourage and assist an immigration of skilled and unskilled alien laborers.

The effect of the poor whites and negroes moving from the farms has been partly counteracted by the influx of farmers from the Northern and Western States, and by small groups of immigrants who are leaving the industrial centers of the North and Middle West to go on the land. Neither of these movements, however, is sufficient to meet the demand for industrial labor in the South, nor to people our millions of vacant acres. The future economic development of the South is therefore dependent on immigration.

This being true it concerns us to know something of the present-day immigration.

Instead of the Dutch and Flemish, English, French, German, Irish, Scandinavian, Scotch, and Welsh home seekers of yesterday, the tide of immigration now casts upon our shores Slavs, Magyars, Greeks, 3em