In addition to ridding Great Britain of unwanted criminals, the 1718 act was also intended to help the colonies with their labor problem. In Virginia, tobacco had become the main source of cash after John Rolfe shipped the first marketable harvest of Nicotiana tabacum to England in 1614. Tobacco is a notoriously labor-intensive crop. The steps by which tobacco is cultivated from seed to market have changed little over the centuries, because most of the work does not lend itself to mechanization.

As the cultivation of tobacco spread, the demand for workers increased as well. In Virginia as in Maryland, this labor demand at first was satisfied by indentured servants who came mostly from England, worked for a fixed number of years for those who paid their passage, and then became "free" planters themselves. Especially during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, crop failures in England and Wales prompted many to leave for the New World. Later, as economic and political conditions in the mother country improved, this source of workers began to dry up and be replaced with slave labor. Between about 1607 and 1699, approximately 96,600 indentured servants entered the colonies, along with about 33,200 slaves. Between 1700 and 1775 those numbers grew to approximately 103,600 indentured servants and an estimated 278,400 enslaved Africans. Clearly, the comparatively small number of convicts immigrating between 1607 and 1699 (2,300) played a lesser role in the economic life of the colonies in the 1600s. By the 1660s, most indentured Africans had generally become bound for life. In 1705, various Virginia laws passed in the latter half of the seventeenth century were combined into the "slave code," thus institutionalizing the system of African enslavement. While Virginia was home to approximately 300 Africans in 1649, that number grew to roughly 3,000 by 1677, to perhaps 13,000 by 1700, and to about 27,000 by 1720. Despite the increasing African population, smaller planters and various tradesmen, shipbuilders, and iron manufacturers retained a need for cheap white labor. Although the market price of tobacco fluctuated, it remained high enough to justify the acquisition of indentured servants or the purchase of slaves.

Using British genealogist Peter Wilson Coldham's volumes of convict lists and runaway ads, among other sources, to analyze the British convicts sent to Virginia, the historian Lyda C. Bitto found that at least 20,000 felons arrived in Virginia between 1718 and 1775. She concluded that, in spite of past studies suggesting that the majority of felons had no skills and were employed as agricultural workers, most of the convicts she analyzed had been sentenced in the London area and surrounding counties and possessed some kind of skill. Thus, she determined that, contrary to popular belief, the felons did make a significant contribution to Virginia's labor force and were not guilty of the majority of the crimes committed in the colony.

While many of the convicts (especially young, unskilled men) were put to work in agriculture for middling planters who could not otherwise afford slaves, other felons were bought by merchants, tradesmen, shipbuilders, and iron manufacturers. An investigation of the skills held by one shipload of convicts revealed that of ninety-eight felons, forty-eight possessed no recognizable trade: sixteen of them were too young to have learned a trade and the other thirty-two were too old to ply one. Of the other fifty, twenty-one had acquired low-level skills and the other twenty-seven were skilled in trades such as barbering, carpentering, and shoemaking.