Immigration From the past to the Present
If there is one thing about immigration that does not change, it must be work. As Muzaffar Chishtii, the director of Migration Policy Institute at New York University, said, “Immigrants come here to work, not for the quality of life.” The size of the immigrant population in the United States has been increasing every year. There is always a reason why people choose to come to here to work. It is undeniable that this country provides great benefits to its residents such as many job opportunities, excellent health care systems, and other welfares. Many people succeeded in America, but there are also people ended up in disappointment. The United States, a country where its roads were paved with gold, has been an unpredictable journey to many immigrants.
The United States was known as the nation of immigrants, or the melting pot. During the seventeenth century, British and other Europeans began settling in this country. The English, Norwegian, and German were examples of the old immigrants. Most of them were protestant, literate, and skilled. The new immigrants settled in America during 1880 to 1910, and they were mostly illiterate and unskilled. In fact, the Jews, Irish, and Italians were the three major groups that arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century. They came for better life, better economic opportunity, and to escape poverty and religious persecution. They took low-paying and unskilled jobs such as waiters and laundresses. Their wages could only afford them to live in crowded tenements, but they had the choice to stay people from their country and preserve their cultures.
The Tenement Museum is a tour building that restored apartments and family history of past residents during different time periods. A tattered tenement was divided into many rooms to support a few families. A family of ten could squeeze in a tiny three room “house.” The corridor was narrow and had no light. There was also no private sink or bathroom for individual family. During the freezing winter, people had to go outside of the house to bring water in order to finish their housework. Not until 1901, the New York State Tenement House Act was passed and imposed light and proper ventilation systems, indoor bathroom, and fire safeguards into tenements, which greatly improved people’s lives.
Immigrants fled to the U.S. for survival and better lives, but reality didn’t always satisfy them. Many immigrants were unskilled and didn’t speak English allowed the rich to exploit them. The working condition in the U.S. is definitely not heaven-like. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company exploited its immigrant workers under horrible working condition. The factory was located at lower Manhattan and occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floor of a ten-story building. It hired mostly recent Jewish and Italian immigrant girls aged from 16 to 23. Nearly all of them did not speak English and they worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. They were paid $7 to $12 a week by working 9 hours during weekdays plus 7 hours on Saturdays, which is equivalent to between $166 and $285 per week in 2014, severely underpaid.
On Saturday, March 25, 1911, around 4:40 in the afternoon, when the workers were already exhausted from a long day of work, a tragic fire started out from a flare in a scrap bin at the corner of the eighth floor. The workers from the lower level were unable to warn the people on the upper floors because there was a lack of safety alarm and other protections. Workers were trapped inside building because the one door was locked and the other only opened inward. They either tried to jam themselves into the elevator or eventually jumped off the building because they could not suffer the burning pain. The fire resulted in the deaths of 146 garment workers. The poor precaution of fire safety revealed corruption between garment industry and city government. After the disaster, New York State created a Factory Investigating Commission to ensure wages, sanitation, and safety in many places. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is remembered as one of the most infamous tragedy in U.S. history.
Another tragic group of immigrants was the Chinese. According to Edward Rothstein’s article “Great Job on the Railroad. Now Go Back to China”, “In 1784, a boat called the Empress of China sailed from New York to Canton, bearing furs, lead, wine, 30 tons of American ginseng and Mexican silver dollars to trade for Chinese goods: porcelain, silk, tea.” Chinese immigration to the United States has a much longer history than many people thought. Their merchants had been trading with America since the eighteenth century, but the major flow of Chinese into the U.S. was during the 1849 California Gold Rush. They were pushed by poverty and overpopulation from their homeland to the U.S., and they wished that they could find gold and send money back to their families. However, most of them ended up working extremely low-pay jobs such as laborers, domestic workers, minors, railroad workers, and fishermen. One of their greatest contributions is the building of the Central Pacific Railroad which connects California and Utah.
Very often, immigrants’ great contribution to the society was not appreciated. Chinese immigrants faced a lot of discrimination because the Europeans couldn’t understand how the Chinese could agree to work under such poor condition with extreme low pay. White people saw the increasing amount of Chinese as a threat that might take over all the jobs. The old immigrants tried to oppress the new immigrants by all means such as making laws to stop them from coming. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 illegalized Chinese to immigrate for ten years. A few exceptions to this rule were students, teachers, businessman, and Chinese Americans citizens’ blood related children. However, those exceptions still faced serious backgrounds check and long interrogations as they entered America. This law forced paper sons and daughters to purchase fraudulent documentations to prove their identities. Eventually, the act was repealed in 1943 as China became an Allies during WWII.
Time has made the past into history. Immigration is changing, but not necessarily just improving. Laws have improved the housing and working condition for people. However, they did not eradicate immigration problems. Nowadays, immigrants are facing different types of challenges.
In 2014, 13.3% of the U.S. population, approximately 42.4 million people was born foreign. 25 % of foreign born are unauthorized, and half of whom are Mexicans. Many of these people walked for long hours to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to enter this country illegally. One example is Olga Flores, a forty-years-old Mexican woman born in Hidalgo. She claimed that the only purpose of a woman in her country was to get married, have children, and cook for her whole life. Therefore, she chose to illegally enter the U.S. in 1998. She worked several jobs before meeting her husband, David, who is a hardworking and caring guy, very different from any of the Mexican men that she knows. All of Olga’s children are U.S. citizens, but she is still afraid of being deported because she needs to take care of her son, who has cancer. In the United States, her son is able to receive much better health care, and she was less concern about the money issues.
Undocumented workers are needed for the work force, but they are unrepresented by the government and they do not share the same benefits as the ones that are documented. There are ways for foreigners to enter U.S. legally, but they have to wait for years. The process is tedious and after years, your immigration is not guaranteed.
As Mr. Chishtii pointed out, “If we need them, we should allow them to come in legally.” In fact, President Barack Obama had tried his best to improve the situation. One example is the DREAM Act, which provides benefits to undocumented immigrants, such as qualifying them for driver’s licenses. There are also other programs that help documented or undocumented immigrants to walk through their difficult journeys. However, many of the Republicans reacted sharply to Obama’s policies. Jeff Sessions, Obama’s chief adversary in Congress, said, “If everyone who enters the country illegally can stay and become a citizen, that just encourages more people to come illegally.”
Another Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, addressed an absurd proposal on the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico. He commented, “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” His proposal was to force Mexico to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border or give America the money to build it, which was nearly impossible to occur in reality.
In fact, the government had already passed acts to control illegal immigration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was signed into law by Ronald Regan, which illegalizes employers to hire illegal immigrants knowingly. In 1996, President Bill Clinton also increased the penalty on immigrants who violate criminal laws. Because of all these laws, there was a sharp increase in deportation in 1996. Recently, Obama’s opponents had made immigration much more difficult. Just under Obama’s presidency, 2.5 million people were deported from the U.S., the most deportation cases during the past 7 years.
There are gains and losses to immigration. Immigrants always face discrimination in this country. Though many immigrants lived and worked in horrible condition in the U.S., they were able to escape religious persecution, poverty, hunger, and other terrible situations in their own countries. Life in America might be difficult and challenging at the beginning, but immigrants are benefited in many ways as well. There is excellent health care, freedom, better education, better standard of living, living space, transportation, science and technology, and job opportunities in the United States.
Over the centuries, immigration has been changing accordingly. Immigrants have been facing different challenges at different time periods. Laws have been constantly changing the system. But one thing that did not change was work. There is no free lunch in this world. There is a price to everything. Everything is about work, work, and work.
