From the 1880s to WWI, the southern immigration movement (SIM) sought to recruit Europeans to the US South as laborers and settlers. A loosely coordinated effort led by white elites (planters, railroad men, cotton mill owners, and allied politicians and editors), the SIM succeeded in establishing and/or reviving immigration bureaus in several southern states, but its results were otherwise modest. In 1910 after three decades of recruitment efforts, the proportion of European immigrants in the region’s population had not budged. This has led most historians of the New South to dismiss the SIM as a footnote or ignore it altogether. Nevertheless, this talk argues that the SIM has things to teach us both about New South elites and the progressives who sought to influence them. Whereas the former saw European immigration as the key to whitening the South’s population and modernizing its economy, the latter used the South’s desire for immigrants as leverage to press for new laws to protect laborers threatened by peonage and African Americans facing an epidemic of lynching.