There is definitely a stark contrast between life more than one hundred years ago and life today, as many people already highlighted. The basic necessities which we have now, such as indoor plumbing that actually functions and insulation from the cold and heat outside, was a luxury that only the rich and elite could obtain and afford. The immigrants lived in impoverished tenements with many people crowded together in a tiny apartment. What bothered me when I was reading was the fact that outsiders and the rich described the conditions of the Five Points tenements as horrendous, yet they didn’t do anything. Instead, it became a spectacle for outsiders to get a glimpse of slum life.
One thing that I did admire in the readings, as Rebecca mentioned, was the fact that the immigrants were kind to each other and formed communities to support one another. In Brownsville, Pritchett describes how the Jewish immigrants created organizations to help others in their neighborhood, like the Hebrew Ladies Day Nursery that opened day cares or the Melbish Arum Society which collected clothes for poor children. So even though though the immigrants went through difficult times, they had each other.
While immigration has definitiely changed since the late 1800s and early 1900s, there are still some similarities. For example, Foner mentions how immigrants still tend to settle within similar ethnic groups or nationalities, which is understandable because they would feel more comfortable and have some common traits with each other.
Bringing up capitalism again, was it really the cause of poverty in these neighborhoods? Like Liz, I don’t believe capitalism is entrely at fault, although it probably did have an influence. It gives someone the opportunity to improve economically, but unfortunately, most of the immigrants were unble to do so because of low-paying jobs. But I don’t believe that socialism would have alleviated the problem either.
