I find it appalling that some of the most atrocious indecencies that turn of the century immigrants suffered are still around for the immigrants of today. When reading Nancy Foner’s description of the tenements, I could not believe the squalor that immigrants lived in. Tiny, overcrowded apartments with no heat, no running water and no sunlight were the norm for many who lived in the Lower East Side. Some immigrants had left reasonable living conditions in their home countries hoping to make a better life for themselves in America, only to find themselves in absolutely inhumane conditions here. I wonder how many of them regretted their move and how many felt that it had truly given their families a better chance in life.
It is easy to shrug off the environments that the immigrants of old lived in by saying that it was another time, that things were different, health codes did not yet exist. How is it, then, that certain immigrants today live in the same horrifying circumstances? Foner writes of “Mexican immigrants inhabiting tunnel-like spaces behind buildings in Washington Height; of Korean workers ‘hotbedding’…and of Chinese men being packed with ten or fifteen others into one-bedroom Chinatown apartments.” It is difficult to imagine that in the same city that multi-millionaires own humongous penthouse apartments, there could be others living in such poverty. One journalist even deems the immigrants who reside in these conditions the “all-but-homeless.” It is terrible that people have come to our country to improve their lives and this is how they are forced to live.
Troubling also is the disparity in deficient housing between races. There is only a small difference between foreign-born and native-born families who live in subpar homes, but when the groups are divided into races the difference becomes much more striking. While 34% of foreign-born Dominicans live in insufficient housing, a mere 8% of native-born non-Hispanic Whites do. This shows that there is a racial element to social class, even in modern times.
