Whats the “45% were middle class” referring to? Also I didn’t say nobody coming into the US was poor, my main gripe is with the “Almost all of us”, as if the white immigrants benefitting from slavery and genocide were a small part. As for what the white laborers were up to, we only need to read a bit further in the book I’m urging everyone here to read:

What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. … To this new layer of European labor was denied the gross privileges of the settler bourgeoisie, who annexed whole nations. Even the particular privileges that so comforted the earlier Euro-Amerikan farmers and artisans - most particularly that of “annexing” individual plots of land every time their Empire advanced - were denied these European wage-slaves. But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as “white man’s wages”), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.

We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to “discriminate against” or “exclude” or were “prejudiced against” colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and ‘annex’, so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.

If you want to actually know about the irish and other immigrant workers and don’t like to read that much I would recommend Chapter 4.5 “Contradictions of white labor” where this passage is from, but again the whole book is superb.