Like everyone has mentioned, the chapters in Anbinder were utterly painful to read. People in modern times have a concept of poverty that cannot even come close to the hell on earth faced by the Irish during the 1800s- both in their homeland and then in New York. To imagine living without ceilings, on dirt floors, with no beds, surrounded by corpses on the streets- these people must have been walking zombies! I remember one horrifying account in the book of Irish crawling on all fours, scrounging for any food they could find.
This reminded me of something I learned in psychology: Maslow’s concept of the hierarchy of needs. Basically life is like a pyramid with basic needs at the base, such as food and water. Without these basic needs, one cannot focus on those categories further up the pyramid: security/property, love, esteem, and finally “self actualization” or inner peace. The fact that people lived in such horrid conditions, and had barely any property of their own meant that they couldn’t even get over the first rung of the ladder; they lived meal to meal, job to job- basically like animals. In a sense they had “freedom” and “wages” but were no better off than slaves…slaves to their own needs, trapped without any immediate hope for social mobility or creative pursuit. I think this ties in to the concept of “wage slavery” we learned last week in class. According to the reading, some of these people made $10 a year or less….I don’t even have the words to react to that!
In the reading we also learned of the immigrant groups who came after the Irish, who had a slightly better situation, but nevertheless still went through a hell of their own. I found it sad, but also a little interesting to read of the selling of Italian children as essential slave labor, as well as the Italian workforce’s replacement of the Irish. It was also to interesting to read about how the Chinese fared, who they married and how they were perceived It seems that with each generation a new “layer” of immigrants is added to the US, and the previous layer seems to gain a better footing economically. Also, as many others mentioned, Foner compares old immigrants to the new immigrants of today, who can reach the US by plane in a few hours wearing “designer jeans” in contrast to in a tightly packed, disease-ridden ship,wearing only rags.
However, like Praveena, I am puzzled as to why some immigrants with graduate degrees or specialized jobs come to America and are willing to experience a downgrade in economic stability: like the example she brought up of the Indian doctor becoming a taxi driver Perhaps that is something we will explore further.
