In the final six weeks of 1872, two thousand haggard Italian immigrants disembarked at New York, more than had arrived in the previous ten months. What had sparked this sudden influx? In Italy, a faltering economy forced thousands of unemployed peasants to leave the country. Plagued by labor shortages, South American nations like Argentina and Brazil welcomed the migrants.

Emigration bureaus in Italian seaports encouraged the growth of transatlantic ticket sales. Eager to profit from the thriving trade, grifters in Italy set up illegitimate travel agencies, preying on their unwary countrymen’s desperation. At times, the shipping lines themselves were in on the fraud.

On November 18, 1872, the S. S. Holland entered New York Harbor after a two-week voyage. Of the almost 800 passengers, a large majority were Italians. As soon as they disembarked, nearly 300 of them converged on the immigration office at Castle Garden. In Italy, they had been promised work.

But there was none. With the aid of an interpreter, they recounted to authorities that they were victims of a scam. For the next four months thousands of Italians were lured to the U.S. by false promises of work. In the fall of 1872, Italians who had paid full fare to Argentina were persuaded to go to New York with promises that southbound steamships would take them to South America at no extra cost. Arriving at the Castle Garden depot and finding no such vessels, the travelers realized they had been cheated and abandoned at the port. The commissioners at Castle Garden were tasked with lodging the unfortunate immigrants and providing them with work. After the Italians helped clear a record snowfall from the streets of New York, public approval of the alien laborers grew. But when employers began hiring out immigrants as strikebreakers in New York and other states, anger replaced goodwill. Hostility reached a climax when Italian immigrants took the jobs of striking coal miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Italians were first brought to the coalfields in March 1873, when two hundred of them replaced strikers in the Coalburg and Church Hill mining camps near Youngstown, Ohio. As a result, the strike failed, and an angry lynch mob murdered one of the Italians. The following year, another group of Italian immigrants entered coal mines near Pittsburgh during a bitter strike. Protesters killed three Italians and drove the rest out of the pits.

At great personal risk, the Italian immigrants were constantly thrust between capital and labor. Employers seeking cheap labor increasingly hired Italians to supplant rank and file workers. Gradually, however, the newcomers gained a foothold in their adopted homeland and earned the respect of their American counterparts.

This is the story of the three thousand Italians, victims of con men in 1872, who overcame adversity to achieve the American Dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkJGadU8ijc&t=4s