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Ethnic and racial discrimination against immigrants
Discrimination against immigrants
Discrimination against immigrants
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The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) describes the hardships of being an immigrant. Such as, not knowing the language, low pay, and keeping a job. One piece of evidence to support that not only knowing, but understanding the language is sometimes life or death, is when Ona and Jurgis go to buy a house and they are charged a whole lot more money than they were going to buy it for. They also had to pay $12 more per month just because they could not understand what they were getting into.(Sinclair 55 ) Another piece of evidence to support that not only knowing but understanding the language is sometimes critical to survival is again, when they go to buy the house. They did not realize how much time it would take to pay off the debt and actually own the house. "A monthly rental of twelve dollars, for a period of eight years and four months!" (Sinclair 55). The lithuanian realtor who sold them the house had neglected to mention that it was rent and not a home. The reason they did not like that it was a rental was because, if they missed their rent by a day it was …show more content…
The family and Jurgis are always on a rollercoaster of a lot of money and bankrupt mostly because their jobs pay fluctuates so much. Their pay always relies on the boss so they control it so that means they (the bosses) can basically make the immigrants work as hard as they want them to or threaten to not pay them at all.(Sinclair 163) In this passage, Ona is raped and taken to a brothel because her boss (Conner) threatens to fire her and put her whole family on a blacklist if she does not do what he says. Another reason low pay is bad is because it is one of the reasons so many people died from diseases, they could not afford to pay for medical attention. By the end of the book 7 out of the starting 12 people die from just medical injuries that can be treated with proper care. These examples show how bad low pay
... many immigrants faced discrimination, thus leaving them no choice but to live in the slums of some areas and try fight their way up to success.
The period of time running from the 1890’s through the early 1930’s is often referred to as the “Progressive Era.” It was a time where names such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller stood for the progress of America and their great contributions to American industry and innovation. This chapter however, has a much darker side. Deplorable working conditions, rampant political corruption and power hungry monopolies and trusts threatened the working class of America and the steady influx of European immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families. What started as a grass-roots movement pushing for political reform at the local and municipal levels soon began to encompass
In today’s society you either have to work hard to live a good life, or just inherit a lump sum of cash, which is probably never going to happen. So instead a person has to work a usual nine to five just to put food on the table for their families, and in many cases that is not even enough. In the article, “Why We Work” by Andrew Curry, Curry examines the complexities of work and touches on the reasons why many workers feel unsatisfied with their jobs. Barbara Ehrenreich writes an essay called, “Serving in Florida” which is about the overlooked life of being a server and the struggles of working off low minimum wages. Curry’s standpoint on jobs is that workers are not satisfied, the job takes control of their whole life, and workers spend
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” gave the most in-depth description of the horrid truths about the way America’s food companies, “the only source of food for people living in the city,” are preparing the food they sell. “The Jungle” describes the terrible
Discuss how Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tensions and historical processes at hand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Languages Impact Children’s Ability to Reason about Mental States?. The Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, Apr. 2010. Web. 7 Sep. 2013. .
When a baby is born, he/she comes into this world eager to learn. Always taking in information and absorbing it like a new computer. Every experience he/she encounters could possibly stick in that baby’s mind. However, some of the things that a child hears or perceives can either benefit or corrupt their learning. Teaching a child a second language has the same concept as putting in new software in a computer. Many advantages come with a safe and powerful computer and the same would come with knowing a second language. If a child was not taught a second language in their early years, that child might be at a disadvantage in their future, and as that child grows up not knowing a second language could potentially hold him/her back with grades and obtaining a job. Knowing a second language can benefit from those things and can also help with keeping strong ties with their family, culture, community, and even music.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
Having an understanding will determine whether or not one will have an indulgent of language. As Berry states, “illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger. Think how constantly "the average American" is surrounded by premeditated language, in newspapers and magazines, on signs and billboards, on TV and forever being asked to buy or believe somebody else's line of goods.” If a person reads a newspaper and can’t understand what’s written, it’s definitely going to be a personal danger. Now when that person is asked a question about the news spread or what a product does that is shown in a magazine, if one can’t understand what’s scripted that same person won’t able to clarify it and that’s public danger. Even if the product looks good in a magazine or billboard, but if one can’t understand what the product does than he or she won’t be able to purchase the item. Majority of the Americans watch debates on TV and if one person doesn’t understand anything that the candidates are saying, then that person will have a hard time conversing with family members or even colleagues. Being illiterate will have a toll in a person’s ordinary ambiance, but having knowledge will make it easier for a person to have discussions about their understandings on what’s written, seen, read, or
The 1906 novel, The Jungle talked about some of Sinclair’s concerns. Worker exploitation was one of his concerns. This novel also showed how companies would sell rancid vermin-infested meat and how it was processed. Most of the workers lived in Packingtown, which were immigrants and their children. Northern and Central Europe immigrants were mainly Protestants, even though numerous Irish and German Catholics moved as well. In the twentieth century, about nine million immigrants came to America. Many immigrants moved to Chicago rather than any city besides New York. The immigrants were attracted by the construction jobs in the downtown area and they would work in huge manufacturing firms.
In Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, he exposes corruption in both business and politics, as well as its disastrous effects on a family from Lithuania. In a protest novel, the ills of society are dramatized for its effect on its characters in the story. The Jungle is an example of protest literature because it exposes in a muckraking style the lethal and penurious conditions that laborers lived and worked in, corruption in business and politics, and the unsanitary meat that was sold.
Even though monopolies are illegal, public corruption allows companies to form and continues to be a problem today. In an article published by the Los Angeles, Anh Do
The gap in wealth between the rich and the poor continues to grow larger, as productivity increases but wages remain the same. There were changes in the tax structure that gave the wealthy tax breaks, such as only taxing for social security within the first $113,700 of income in a year. For CEOs this tax was paid off almost immediately. Free trade treaties broke barriers to trade and resulted in outsourcing and lower wages for workers. In “Job on the Line” by William Adler, a worker named Mollie James lost her job when the factory moved to Mexico. “The job in which Mollie James once took great pride, the job that both fostered and repaid her loyalty by enabling her to rise above humble beginnings and provide for her family – that job does not now pay Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on” (489). When Balbina started working she was only making 65 cents an hour. Another huge issue lies in the minimum wage. In 2007, the minimum wage was only 51% of the living wage in America. How can a person live 51% of a life? Especially when cuts were being made in anti-poverty and welfare programs that were intended to get people on their feet. Now, it seems that the system keeps people down, as they try to earn more but their benefits are taken away faster than they can earn. Even when workers tried to get together to help themselves they were thrown
During supper, I got to experience a language I was not familiar with. We know when a person speaks in the same language it automatically unites and binds us together. But when we don’t speak the language it isolates and
Language?is the most common aspect among human beings, and the most complex and interesting cultural inheritance in any given ideological reality. It is the instrument for communication through which humans express their existence, identity, culture, philosophy, etc. Humans are social beings; every act of social conduction involves communication with others. we build communities, societies, and nations via the use of language. It is even the case with learning a foreign language; the learners acquire the language for different reasons, but mainly for communicative purposes. Teaching a foreign language has become a necessity nowadays; it is a mandatory