Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban

utility of hired labor to the production of domesticity. Chapter 6 brings the book’s different narrative arcs together by engaging public and expert debates about whether domestic service could best be reformed and made modern through changes to labor relations in the home or whether Chinese and black workers’ alleged predisposition to servitude meant that looking for racialized sources of labor continued to be the best solution for “fixing” the occupation. Examining the start of the Great Migration, the 1917 Immigration Act, and the eventual passage of numerical restrictions on European immigration that the 1924 Immigration Act instituted, this chapter argues that the various exceptions built into immigration laws, which had exempted domestic servants from restrictions since the passage of the 1885 Foran Act, finally gave way to the conclusion that white women could no longer be counted on to do this work.

      A basic but often overlooked question persists in the United States and other wealthy nations where service workers are drawn from the ranks of immigrants: under what terms and conditions are certain workers allowed to migrate in order to serve others? To not grapple with this question is to naturalize policies that, after 1924, have supplied middle-class households with labor in situations where servants, especially live-in ones, would not otherwise be procurable. The epilogue to this book touches on how U.S. internment of Japanese Americans and their supervised parole during World War II provided displaced persons for hire as servants. It also briefly explores the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, whose sponsorship requirements meant that European refugees could agree to work as live-in servants in exchange for asylum. More attention is devoted to the labor exceptions built into the 1965 Immigration Act, which provided Jamaican and other Caribbean women with a short-lived opportunity to enter the United States after taking advantage of immigration quota rankings that privileged domestic servants. Policies that continue to authorize migrant servants’ temporary admission into the United States, contingent on their performance of domestic service to the employers they entered with, also garner focus here. Finally, the epilogue concludes by discussing how household consumers have exploited domestic and care workers classified as undocumented—and how the absence of state action has enabled this social relation of production.

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      The idea that the servitude of free laborers and free migrants had to be brokered challenges, on an epistemological level, how we view a past where liberty of contract allegedly triumphed against enslavement, indenture, and other forms of coercion that kept workers in a state of bondage. Accordingly, it is all the more important to delve into how intermediaries sought to justify interventions into labor markets and migratory processes, and to untangle why they presupposed the need to impose various controls. It is also essential, however, to keep in mind how servants’ actions and employers’ and brokers’ perceptions of workers’ agency influenced and obligated regulatory responses. As historian Walter Johnson has argued, historic agency is best understood in the nuanced circumstances in which it operated, and not through ahistorical maxims idealizing certain performances of liberal freedom. Independence and self-determination were not just ideological constructs of liberalism, but signifying concepts that whites used to maintain the exclusivity of their fitness for sovereign self-governance.62

      Examples of this dialectic between resistance and control are myriad. When a white St. Alban’s employer wrote to the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1870 to complain that the two “black boys” whose rail fare he had paid absconded en route, we can assume that they were motivated to break their contracts by the lure of a better option that presented itself during their journey north. The Freedmen’s Bureau, eager to maintain its reputation as a broker, sent two black refugee women instead.63 When a correspondent for the New York Times reported from San Francisco in 1878 that Chinese servants demanded higher wages than their white counterparts, and that local employers were willing to pay the extra money, we can decipher that Chinese laborers were not the “coolies” that opponents made them out to be.64 Rather, they were savvy market actors who knew how to leverage the very racial difference that employers produced and validated. In 1902, when Marie von Rhein, a twenty-year-old German immigrant, broke an oral agreement that she had entered into with a prospective domestic employer while in transit from Bremen to New York, we can conclude that she had good reason to change her mind upon landing. William Williams, the commissioner of Ellis Island, tracked her down nonetheless, after accusing a missionary and broker from the Lutheran Emigrant Home of conspiring to steal her labor. Had she been permitted to freely enter the United States unaccompanied, as male immigrants were, the matter of whom she needed to be contracted to would have been evaded altogether.65

      If freedom is to be populated with real meaning, the purposeful abdications of its underlying economic and political principles must be diligently exposed.

      1

      Liberating Free Labor

      Vere Foster and Assisted Irish Emigration, 1850–1865

      Introduction: Assistance, Relief, Control

      Assisted emigration accounted for less than 4 percent of departures from Ireland during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the roughly 275,000 people who left the island after receiving financial aid from landlords, the British state, or private philanthropists deserve attention as cases that demonstrate how the redistribution of underemployed surplus labor was governed and imagined as a resource for white, Anglophone settlements.1 Bracketed by the Irish Famine and the beginnings of mass migration to the United States, and the Civil War, the period of 1850 to 1865 saw key developments relating to what it meant to be a free laborer and migrant if one was a young, unaccompanied Irish woman. By the end of the war, Irish servants were avidly pursuing the benefits that came with the ability to contract their labor freely, much to the dismay of Anglo-American employers. In conflict with the prescriptions that the brokers of their labor offered, which urged them to move west into the interior and marry, Irish servants crafted racial and political identities as independent, urban wage earners instead.

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      Mary Harlon had strong opinions about wages, working conditions, and the respect she deserved as a domestic servant. Contrary to what might be expected of an Irish orphan whose emigration was paid for by charitable funds, Harlon was hardly a dependent. Between May 1862 and October 1865, she shared her perspectives on work and life in a series of six letters she wrote to Vere Foster, the man who sponsored her immigration. Foster was a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Using his personal inheritance and private donations solicited through his Pioneer Irish Emigration Fund, Foster financed the passage of approximately 1,250 Irish women between 1850 and 1857. During the early 1880s, Foster subsidized the emigration of an additional 20,000 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty, paying for half the cost of their steamship tickets.2 The Foster family had been landlords in County Louth, Ireland, since the late eighteenth century, and most of the emigrants who applied for assistance in the 1850s came from the area around Glyde Court, the family’s estate. Foster appears to have been an acquaintance of Harlon’s parish priest, who probably connected the two. In her letters, Harlon asked Foster to relay to a Father Smyth that she was attending Mass every Sunday, and that she received communion whenever her work schedule allowed.

      Foster was a critic of private and state-backed initiatives that dispensed charity without calculating what returns their investment might bring.3 Influenced by the emerging social science of charity work in Britain, Foster’s solicitations for financial support included the controversial proposal calling for prohibitions on the emigration of families, which landlords could finance as an alternative to paying taxes that supported local workhouses and outdoor relief. Foster believed that the migration of whole families increased the likelihood of pauperism, and that it was prudent to identify the most capable individual wage earners when administering emigration assistance.4 Because the arrival of pauper families also aggravated nativist public opinion in the United States, their emigration endangered the trust on which more productive transfers of populations between nation-states rested. Framing migration as the trade in human subjects, Foster noted that his program was designed to minimize the possibility of “some trifling misunderstanding between the governments of the two most free and progressive countries on the globe.”5 The migrants Foster sponsored were asked to repay the assistance they received, although no data exist on how many actually