In 1852 the Argentine political philosopher Juan Bautista Alberdi published Bases and Points of Departure for Argentine Political Organization, in which he argued that the development of his country depended on immigration. Indians and blacks, Alberdi maintained, lacked basic skills, and it would take too long to train them. Thus he pressed for massive immigration from northern Europe and the United States:

Each European who comes to our shores brings more civilization in his habits, which will later be passed on to our inhabitants, than many books of philosophy. . . . Do we want to sow and cultivate in America English liberty, French culture, and the diligence of men from Europe and from the United States? Let us bring living pieces of these qualities.5

Alberdi’s ideas, guided by the aphorism “to govern is to populate,” won immediate acceptance and were even incorporated into the Argentine constitution, which declared, “The Federal government will encourage European immigration.” Other Latin American countries adopted similar policies promoting immigration to achieve similar goals.

Coffee barons in Brazil, latifundiarios (owners of vast estates) in Argentina, or investors in nitrate and copper mining in Chile made enormous profits that they reinvested in new factories. Latin America had been tied to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and northern Europe from the outset as a provider of raw materials and as a consumer of industrial goods. In the major exporting countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, domestic industrialization now began to take hold in the form of textile mills, food-processing plants, and mechanized transportation such as modern ports and railroads.

By the turn of the twentieth century, industrial parks had emerged in Mexico City, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. In 1907 Brazil had an industrial working class of 150,000. By 1914 Argentina’s numbered 400,000. In Brazil and Argentina these workers were mainly European immigrants. The workers proved unexpectedly contentious: they brought with them radical ideologies that challenged liberalism, particularly anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, a version of anarchism that advocated placing power in the hands of labor unions. These workers clashed with bosses and political leaders who rejected the idea that workers had rights. The authorities suppressed worker organizations such as unions, and they resisted implementing labor laws such as a minimum wage, restrictions on child labor, the right to strike, or factory safety regulations. Workers had little political voice — the first Latin American country to grant universal male suffrage, Argentina, only did so in 1912.

Although Europe was a significant source of immigrants to Latin America, so were Asia and the Middle East. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries large numbers of Japanese arrived in Brazil, most settling in São Paulo state. By 1920 Brazil had the largest Japanese community in the world outside of Japan. From the Middle East, Lebanese, Turks, and Syrians also entered Brazil. Between 1850 and 1880, 144,000 South Asian laborers went to Trinidad, 39,000 to Jamaica, and smaller numbers to the islands of St. Lucia, Grenada, and St. Vincent, mostly as indentured servants under five-year contracts. Perhaps one-third returned to India, but the rest stayed, saved money, and bought small businesses or land. Cuba, the largest of the Caribbean islands (about the size of the state of Pennsylvania), had received 500,000 African slaves between 1808 and 1865. When slavery was abolished in 1886, some of the work in the sugarcane fields was done by Chinese indentured servants, who followed the same pattern as the South Asian migrants who had gone to Trinidad. Likewise, the abolition of slavery in Mexico led to the arrival of thousands of Chinese bonded servants.

Thanks to the influx of new arrivals, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City, Montevideo, Santiago, and Havana experienced spectacular growth. By 1914 Buenos Aires in particular had emerged as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, with a population of 3.6 million. As Argentina’s political capital, the city housed its government bureaucracies and agencies. The meatpacking, food-processing, flour-milling, and wool industries were concentrated there as well. Half of all overseas tonnage passed through the city, which was also the heart of the nation’s railroad network. Elegant shops near the Plaza de Mayo catered to the expensive tastes of the elite upper classes that constituted about 5 percent of the population. By contrast, the thousands of immigrants who toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week, on docks and construction sites and in meatpacking plants were crowded into the city’s one-room tenements, furnished with a few iron cots, a table and chairs, and maybe an old trunk.

Immigrants brought wide-ranging skills that helped develop industry and commerce. In Argentina, Italian and Spanish settlers stimulated the expansion of cattle ranching, meat processing, wheat farming, and the shoe industry. In Brazil, Swiss immigrants built the cheese business, Italians gained a leading role in the coffee industry, and Japanese farmers made the country self-sufficient in rice production. In Peru, Italians became influential in banking and the restaurant business, while the French dominated dressmaking as well as the jewelry and pharmaceutical businesses. Chinese laborers built Peruvian railroads, and in sections of large cities such as Lima, the Chinese dominated the ownership of shops and restaurants.

The vast majority of migrants were unmarried males; seven out of ten people who landed in Argentina between 1857 and 1924 were single males between thirteen and forty years old. There, as in other larger South American countries, many of those who stayed married native-born women who were often of mixed indigenous or African ancestry.