An Invasion from the North? When Americans Feared an Invasion From Their Northern Border — In the Late 19th Century, the French Canadians Who Came to Work in Cotton Mills Were Treated as “Pawns in a Catholic Plot”

David Vermette on Zocalo Public Square remins us of another time in which the United taes worried about an “invasion” of immigrants: 

“In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of the United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. `Manufacturing New England, Puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,’ she wrote.” 

Vermette continues:

“Franco-American efforts to preserve their culture soon aroused suspicion and enmity. By the 1880s, elite American newspapers, including The New York Times, saw a sinister plot afoot. The Catholic Church, they said, had dispatched French Canadian workers southward in a bid to seize control of New England. Eventually, the theory went, Québec would sever its British ties and annex New England to a new nation-state called New France. Alarmists presented as evidence for the demographic threat the seemingly endless influx of immigrants across the northeastern border, coupled with the large family size of the Franco-Americans, where 10 or 12 children was common, and many more not unknown.”

KJ