Reading Chapter 3, “The Work They Do”, only reminded me of the hardships and struggles immigrants face in this country that is mainly caused by the lack of employment available to them. When Foner described the immigrant wave of the nineteenth century, Russian Jews and Italians were the main groups of immigrants present in New York, who actually did not actually have to compete with each other for jobs, to my surprise. The Russian Jews cleverly jumped into the garment industry that caused an array of jobs to open in that field, while Italians were stuck with the lower-end jobs. I was astonished at the ethnic separation between the different types of Europeans, as stated on page 88, “[…] many of the northwestern Europeans ‘referred to themselves as ‘white men’, lumping the Italians, Poles, and Negroes as non-white.’” This struck me the most while reading because it seemed that the Italians were discriminated against because of the lower-end jobs many of them had, which was ironic because Italians were obviously white. Foner emphasized the reason for such an occurrence was because of higher level of education the Russian Jews possessed over the Italians before immigrating to this country.
When it mentioned how padrones were paid by Italian men for finding work for them, it reminded me of that article in the NY Times that described the Chinatown employment agencies. I had not known such a system even existed back then. But the padrone system then was full of corruption since the padronis tricked the Italian immigrants out of their money by lying about jobs, charging expensive rates, and even firing workers that just got hired. This shows how desperate some of these immigrants were when searching for jobs.
Throughout the chapter, Foner stressed how education plays a major factor in affecting job opportunities for immigrants. It was also the ability to communicate in English, U.S. job experience, and network ties that prevented immigrants from entering the mainstream economy. The reason for the abundance of West Indian or Filipino immigrants in the nursing field was due to their skill in the English language since English was the main language taught in their original homelands.
This chapter also shed light on the sacrifices immigrants made such as reputable jobs in their home country. For example, some who were linguistics professor became a housekeeper here or some who were policemen became taxi cab drivers. This again, correlates to the discussions in class from the beginning of the year about why immigrants are willing to sacrifice so much just to come here.
It was also very interesting to see how all those “stereotypical” businesses began in this country. By “stereotypical”, I mean Chinese take-out restaurants or Korean laundromats. I had not known before that the restaurants in Chinatown were created originally to serve quick and inexpensive meals for male sojourners who did not have wives to cook at home for them.
