Some settled permanently and others returned to their homeland. They contributed to the building of a nation by providing a constant source of inexpensive labor, by settling rural regions and industrial cities, and by bringing their unique forms of political and cultural expression. Immigrants to colonial America were welcomed because of its acute need for inexpensive labor. Proprietors seeking to develop large colonies and planters in such areas as the Virginia Tidewater trying to grow crops for a world market needed a constant stream of settlers and workers. Probably over half of all white laborers drawn to the colonies before 1776 were indentured servants, impoverished English persons who worked in the colonies for a fixed period of years to pay off their debts and gain their freedom. But indentured servants, if they didn't die because of bad living conditions, eventually completed their obligations and left their employers. Thus, the need for labor was continuous. The American economy had needed both unskilled and skilled workers through much of the nineteenth century. But after the 1880s, the demand was almost exclusively for unskilled workers to fill the growing number of factory jobs. Coinciding with this were conditions in some areas of Europe, which were undergoing substantial economic changes in the 1880s. Southern and eastern Europeans, dislocated from their land and possessing few skills, were attracted to the burgeoning industries in the United States. Italians heard of the harsh conditions in meat-packing plants in Chicago and avoided them in favor of outdoor work that was more seasonal and would allow them to return to Italy periodically. Immigrants tended to hold dangerous jobs that could result in injury or death. Steelworkers, for instance, readily contracted pneumonia from the daily move between the extremes of intense heat in the mills to the cold of a winter evening.
