I find it really amazing that there is a vast difference between the salaries of people in different countries. In the first chapter it states that “in 1987, the minimum monthly salary for fulltime work in the United States was six times higher than that in the Dominican Republic; by 1991 it was thirteen times higher,” and that most things were taken for granted here in the United States. While that is true the fact that a woman who used to work in a large urban hospital in Brazil made five times more than what she used to by being a babysitter in New York is astounding. Then this spirals into a huge snowball, with the news spreading everywhere in the other countries like a virus. Immigrants are flooding to America with hopes and dreams, and if some of them failed, there were still their friends and families who had been there before they had to soften their fall. That was what happened to my family, even now. My parents had immigrated here in the late 1900s, before any of my relatives. After I was born, more and more of my relatives started coming in from China. During these past two years, my relatives from my mother’s side started flying out to New York. We were the safety net for my other relatives, much like how it was described in the book.

I find it really disheartening that immigrants who had been qualified for their jobs before could not get the same jobs in America. It reminded me slightly of the recents newspaper article that the returning veterans couldn’t get a job even though they were promised one, even if they were skilled in that area in the army. In a way, I feel like that is a bit both unfair and fair. Fair because maybe the education is really different, and just because you were skilled in another country doesn’t mean that you will be skilled in America; unfair because they have already had the education and skills to have a job, but are being denied one.