For me to say who I agreed with I would just end up having to name everyone, because many of us had the same idea. A lot of what we learned about immigration was heavily romanticized or “Disneyfied,” as Elizabeth said. We take for granted (running hot and cold water, indoor toilets that actually work, and even something as simple as your own bed) what many immigrants only dreamed about having. Reading Foner’s book made me really picture what immigrant life was like. I could almost feel myself get claustrophobic at the thought of living in an illegally “sliced and diced” basement with several other immigrant families. Sharing a bathroom with my family of five is hard enough sometimes and it’s almost impossible for me to picture sharing one (unreliable) bathroom with four or five other families. These conditions were without a doubt horrible and unimaginable, and yet so many immigrants experienced this just to have a chance at living and maybe eventually prospering in New York.
As if reading about these living conditions wasn’t bad enough, finding out that people actually went on tours of the “Five Points” is revolting. I could only think to myself did they only go to see how poverty looked and to feel relief and smugness that their life was so much better? One can only want to think better of people, but we all know that people like this existed and still do. We would like the think that these rich people who slummed through these neighborhood would offer some sort of help, but as Toni Ann said about seeing a homeless person on the street, we don’t always give when we see blatant need in front of us. So why are we so shocked the the rich people of this time period didn’t help either?
