In chapter 3 of Nancy Foner’s From Ellis Island to JFK the focus is the employment of immigrants, both old and new. Once again, we see how important networks are for immigrants being able to find jobs. Just as we saw in Sewing Women, workers were often recommended by family members or friends. Employers were more than happy to offer these immigrants jobs for they knew that these workers would work hard, so as not to discredit their sponsors. These workers didn’t complain, so oppressing them wasn’t any sort of risk. Additionally, certain industries were dominated by one or another race, which made getting a job in that industry difficult for a member of a different race. This was the case in garment factories described in Sewing Women, where only Chinese women were hired. Today, such exclusivity is rare, and both neighborhoods and job industries are becoming more and more diverse.
The jobs that immigrants were able to find upon their arrival were blue collar jobs that didn’t require much knowledge of the English language or an education. Foreign degrees and certifications were not considered valid proof of one’s eligibility to be the doctor or lawyer one was educated to be. Even today, immigrants who used to be white collar workers who had relatively prestigious jobs in their home countries can’t work in the fields in which they have educations because they have foreign degrees. Jobs in blue collar jobs are less strict about foreign degrees, but it is still very tough to get a job in the correct field from the get-go. Immigrants who are skilled and “specialized” end up working right beside the unskilled who may not even be literate in their native languages, let alone English. When will there be a push for more equal opportunity (pardon the cliché) for immigrants, especially in a big city like New York.
Chapter 4 went on to talk about the lives of immigrant women specifically. Until quite recently (four or five decades), women were not at all considered to be men’s equals. They weren’t expected to work, and were even disallowed from doing so. The only occupation that a woman was to have was being a housewife. The census data that we saw at the LES Tenement Museum was proof of this, as the wives in the families didn’t have jobs listed. What I find to be interesting is that children were allowed to work from the age of twelve, regardless of gender, but upon getting married, a woman was to stay at home. The man in the family was not to feel inferior to his woman. No, no, no. If a woman did happy to work, under no circumstances was her income to exceed that of her husband.
Nowadays much is different, as women and men have equal employment opportunities and gender is disregarded by hirers and spouses. Women often carry more than half of the load that Foner mentions, because many continue to wash the dishes, do the laundry, clean the home, and do other things around the house. However, now, additionally, they work full-time jobs, some more physically taxing than those held by males. Even so, women are still viewed as unfit for certain jobs by a number of employers worldwide, although this isn’t expressed openly as it was prior.
