Crossing the Atlantic: Post #2

This will be the second of four blog posts in this assignment that covers and explains the significance of people, places and power in European immigration to America. Since the last post, I have been exposed to new source material that allows for a more in-depth look at how immigrants arrived in this country from Europe, as well as how they lived and were treated in the months or even years after their arrival. One activity lays out, step by step what it was like to pass through Ellis Island (http://teacher.scholastic.com/ACTIVITIES/immigration/tour/index.htm), whilst the other activity allows for a closer look into tenements lived in by immigrant and their families while they were fresh off the boat and looking for work (http://www.tenement.org/Virtual_Tour/vt_rogar.html). Each source is able to expand on just how people, places and power was each significant in its own way by allowing for new insight into each topic as well as a new perspective from the readings that were analyzed in the last post.

Key terms

• Immigration: Immigration is defined as the act of moving to a country of which one is not native, usually with the intention to permanently stay. During the early 20th century, many immigrants came from European countries that had struggling economies or suffered from famines or other disasters. They would then gather everything they had and take it across the ocean to America, having to travel through Ellis Island to be approved. 
• Pogroms: Pogroms were the organized persecution of Jews in Russia during the late 19th and early 20th century. They ranged from random acts of vandalism to violence and murders. These Pogroms drove many Jewish family out of Russia and eastern Europe, many of whom immigrated to America to try and find a better life, free of persecution. 
• Ellis Island: Ellis Island is a small island in the New York bay that formerly was the center of immigration in New York, and the US, as a whole. It was open from 1892 to 1943 and accepted almost 8 million immigrants who wished to enter and live as Americans. The main job of the island was to hold immigrants for inspection before allowing them to actually enter the country. 
• Quarantine: Quarantine, in this case, refers to the section of Ellis Island where immigrants who were deemed unfit to enter the country where held for further examination. Reasons for being quarantined raged from mental health problems to all sorts of physical disabilities, whether small or egregious. 
• Ghettos: The Ghettos were a sectioned off area of many big cities in the US during the early 20th century where immigrants where able to buy homes. Usually kept in awful condition and crammed with people, sometimes 10 to a room, they were horrid places to live, but the immigrants had little choice and the ghettos in many of the cities remained full of immigrants until the later half of the 20th century.
• Restrictive covenants Restrictive covenants where laws and agreements set up by owners of buildings and tenements in large US cities which restricted, or even prohibited, the sale or renting of the housing to immigrants. They were implemented as a way for the building owners to keep immigrants away from their property and asserted their power over the immigrants.They made it extremely difficult for immigrants to find housing in the early stages of US immigration.  
• Tenements Tenements were the apartments or housing that were found in the ghettos, usually extremely small and overcrowded with immigrant families. Usually, these were the only options for immigrants who were just starting in America.
• Immigrants The people who immigrated from their home to America in search of a better life, came from a wide variety of European backgrounds, with many different reasons for immigrating.
• Steerage The tight, enclosed space on a ship where many immigrants were forced to reside in whilst they crossed the Atlantic. Cramped conditions and poor supplies usually made these journies hell for the passengers, who had no other options on how to escape their old lives and start fresh. 
• Sweat shops Some of the only work available to immigrants at the time was working in sweatshops.These jobs had grueling hours with back breaking labor for extremely small pay. Many immigrants were abused at these jobs, as well as having to deal with the labor itself which was also quite dangerous, most of it having to do with the textile business.
• Americanized The process of adopting American culture and trying to replace your own culture in favor of it. Usually undertaken by immigrants who felt that with their new life they must forget their old customs and adopt as many American customs as possible, so as to truly become Americans.
• Greenhorn: one who has arrived in a new country but has not localized to the customs and culture in the new country
• Immigration act: passed in 1924, the act established immigrant quotas designed to reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

Enduring Understandings:

1. It is difficult for someone to pack up their whole life and move to a new country to start over.

• Many immigrants, including Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, had little options when it came to traveling to their new home and often were forced to be crammed inside a ships steerage for weeks or even months. (Transitions, p.265)
• When it came to work, there were few options for immigrants to earn steady pay, most had to work grueling hours in sweatshops for a fraction of the income of their native countrymen. (Transitions, p.272)
• Immigrants were confined to cramped tenement housing within ghettos constructed solely for immigrants and the ultra poor. There may have been as many as 10-12 people per apartment or about 150 to a floor in the early buildings. (America: Pathways to the Present p.530)
• Once the immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, they were examined for even the smallest imperfection or disability, and if an immigrant was suspected of being sick, they were immediately quarantined and might have been deported. 
• Even such trivial things as not having the correct amount of money on you as you tried to enter the country was enough for an immigrant, and even their entire family to be denied access to the US, and in some cases deported to their homeland. (Virtual Ellis Island, 7th stop)

2. People who held power over others tend to take steps to limit the potential of people under them.

• Land and building owners during the immigration boom would usually strike deals called Restrictive Covenants, which limited or even prohibited immigrants from buying housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving them little choice but to rent tenement housing in ghettos. (America: Pathways to the Present p.531)
• The immigration act of 1924 was put into place by the government to limit the amount of immigrants that were allowed to enter the country from certain countries. This was because many Americans were tired of having to deal with the increasing amount of immigrants, and were scared that they would soon eclipse them in success. (Transitions, p.287)
• Sweat shops, the places were most immigrants were forced to work, provided dangerous work to immigrants for extremely small pay and most of the time the immigrants were also harassed by their American bosses.

3. The power one person controlled is usually dictated by the amount of money they control. 

• If an immigrant did not meet the requirement of having twenty dollars when they first enter the country, he might be deported. Therefore, some immigrants charged a small fee for allowing others to borrow their twenty dollars to show the immigration officers, then return it once they passed legal examination. (Virtual Ellis Island, 7th stop)
• As many immigrants entered the country with only a few dollars to their names, they had little power over where they could and could not live or work. Immigrants would only be offered certain tenements to live in, many of which were only two or three rooms for a whole family. Still this housing would require a majority, if not all an immigrant families  money. (Virtual Tenement tour)
• As some Jewish immigrants began to become more successful in the working world, some American businesses and families tried to limit the rights some immigrants had, including their ability to find a job and apply to certain educational institutes. (Transitions, p.288)

In this particular historic event, it is not hard to pinpoint the group that inhabits the bottom of the power structure, the immigrants themselves. The immigrants controlled the least assets when they entered the country and did not have the some rights to fair labor or housing agreements that other Americans at the time were privileged to. The second an immigrant steps off the boat and onto American soil, they are forced to endure and pass rigorous inspection to ensure that they would be able to pull their weight the second they left Ellis Island and integrated into American society. They wee then, as mentioned before, restricted in the housing they could rent and work they could do even if they passed the previous inspection. Immigrants had seldom options other than renting an extremely cramped and derelict tenement for themselves and their family, as well as being relegated to working long hours in sweatshops and other factory settings doing dangerous work for measly wages. The first few months, the settling in and finding a place to live and work, would be hellish because it was very realistic that they might not find a place to live or a place to work and without these essentials, it is very unlikely that those immigrants or their families would be able to attain steady lives in their foreseeable future. Even after the essentials were taken care of, more subtle topics like racism and acts against lower working classes would demoralize some immigrants because many of them had come to America to escape persecution or racism in their home country, and now they arrive in a country of promise and bright futures, and they must once again deal with the racism they fought so hard to escape. Most immigrants wanted nothing more than a brighter future, greater opportunity than what they could be offered in their real homes, but unfortunately many Americans took advantage of these immigrants by making them work their fingers to the bone for just a fraction of the freedoms and rights they deserved.