“This Is The Best Country In The World”

The streets are not really paved with gold in America, as immigrants learned after they came over with determination and hope to improve their occupational and economic status. Anbinder’s Five Points highlights this idea by discussing the types of jobs immigrants did after coming to the USA. Most immigrants were in low-paying occupations, such as laborers, seamstresses, and tailors. Although there were many high-paying industries located in Five Points, the immigrants were not the ones who worked there. Rather the immigrants made about a dollar a day as day laborers, while cabinetmakers were bringing in ten dollars a day. The foreigners must have thought they would, one day, be able to take the higher-paying jobs, but native-born workers worked to keep them out of the better jobs. These people had no desire to help the immigrants adjust to a new country.
The immigrants put in hours of work each week to get a small sum of money, which was harder in the winter due to seasonal layoffs. The layoffs hit the immigrants since they were merely passing through the off-seasons on the money made during the summer, and the small amount of money they did make was definitely not enough. It was even harder when men left their families to find work elsewhere because sometimes women did not hear from their husbands, and they didn’t know if their husbands were still alive. It was especially unfortunate when there were young children in the family because the women have to both take care of the children and make enough money to feed their families.
Although I did already know about hardships faced by immigrants, I was somewhat confused by hearing that they did not work in some seasons as opposed to others. The immigrants earned a dollar a day when they worked. If seasonal layoffs were so common, the immigrants should earn higher incomes in the seasons that they are able to work. How are the immigrants expected to carry on during the winter since they hardly make any money in the first place? After reading about all of the adversity faced by immigrants, it was shocking to read that immigrants still considered America to be “the best country in the world. “ Life didn’t seem so great in America, but maybe when compared to Ireland or other countries, it was better, which is why immigrants still considered it a great place.