The majority of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain were economic migrants. The fact that migration coincided with early industrialisation, allied to the pace and scale of arrival, encouraged contemporaries to see Irish immigration as inextricably linked to the growing social problems of the day. As such, the growing Irish community was an important and much observed feature of the new industrial landscape. To Engels, for example, Irish workers were a reserve army of labour; hapless instruments of employers’ grand plans for industrial expansion and personal profit; tools of terror to prise apart the nascent working class. Indeed, employers generally supported Engels's assertion that ‘The rapid expansion of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command’. Thus, we are led, by contemporary reports, to believe that the Irish worked for under-wages while occupying whole sectors of the sort of work which required endurance and physical strength, rather than skill in great measure. As Cornewall Lewis surmised in 1836:

As a result of the alleged enthusiasm with which the Irish embraced the dirt, heat and pollution of the new industrial workplace, employers desired both to sing their praise and to protect their rights of entry into early Victorian Britain against a mounting tide of opposition. After all, there was, proponents of migration might say, a clear tension between the impression of the Irish as, simultaneously, a burden on the poor rate and a central component in Britain's new economic machine. Alexander Carlile, cotton master of Paisley, summed up employers’ anxieties about Irish labour when he warned Cornewall Lewis that it would be ‘most detrimental to the town and neighbourhood, were the Irish immigrations stopped or even seriously interfered with …’