Wherever the new migration
swarms, there the receding tide leaves a few energetic individuals who
have made for themselves a permanent home. In the wake of construction
gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these
immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an
immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down
house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus
for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the
large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and
there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an
unerring instinct for weeds. Now and then a family finds a forgotten
acre, builds a shack, and starts a small independent market garden.
Within a few years a whole settlement of shacks grows up around it,
and soon the trucking of the neighborhood is in foreign hands.
Seasonal agricultural work often carries the immigrant into distant
canning centers, hop fields, cranberry marshes, orchards, and
vineyards. Every time a migration of this sort occurs, some settlers
remain on land previously thought unfit for cultivation--perhaps a
swamp which they drain or a sand-hill which they fertilize and nurture
into surprising fertility by constant toil.
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