It is hard to imagine how life was for new immigrants coming to America in the 19th and 20th century. We read about the ways that they lived in those horrible tenements and now we get a sense of the job market during that time as well. Apparently getting and maintaining a job wasn’t as easy as it seems. Obviously there was a lot of competition between groups for jobs but at the same time new immigrants were willing to take any job offered to them even if it required long hours but gave less pay. Like Eden said, sometimes they didn’t have a choice.
Women during that time had it pretty bad as well. They had several responsibilities they had to take care of including home/personal life and their job life. Widows and single moms obviously had to work because it was really their only option in order to survive.
It’s interesting to see that many immigrants today are overqualified for their jobs in this country according to their education in their respective countries. For instance most of my uncles are actually engineers and have been for a number of years but work other jobs in New York City because those qualifications were overlooked. I’m not saying that every person that immigrates here should be without a doubt be given a job according to what he/her says but maybe with translators at hand we can give them a little more credit.
This also leads to the problem of job distribution between natives and new immigrants. New immigrants tend to take any job available when sometimes the natives are left behind. Usually the natives tend to be educated and obtain jobs requiring unique skills rather than basic manual labor skills. Nevertheless, it definitely was not easy getting a job nor is it now. A culture barrier has to be broken in order to understand how this country’s economic system works along with the language barrier.
