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Immigrants In Flannery O 'Connor's The Jungle'

722 Words3 Pages

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" America is supposed to be a good place for immigrants. In the book The Jungle immigrants are treated horribly. They are exploited and taken advantage of very easily. In my essay I will be explaining to you how immigrants were taken advantage of in the book. My first piece of evidence comes on pages 149 and 150. Connor, one of the bosses from the packing plant, forced Ona to sleep with him. If she did not do as he asked she would lose her job. He would have her and her whole family fired and replaced. This was a common thing for foremans to do back then. They would use their authority to force the immigrant workers to do whatever they pleased, and if …show more content…

Immigrants would line up for blocks. From 1892 to 1954, over twelve million immigrants entered into the United States through Ellis island alone. That’s a lot of people who are gonna need a job. The employers were aware of the amount of immigrants coming through. Jurgis main fear was being replaced. He was told that the moment you slow down or show weakness they would push you out and put someone else in your place. Jurgis knows there is always someone out there that can do your job better. There is always someone out there that will work harder than you. This pushed Jurgis to work until he couldn't work no more. He pushed himself until he was injured on several occasions. At the packing plant he tore something in his ankle. When he returned back to work he realised that he no longer has a job. Same thing happened in the fertilizer mill. He was in jail for 30 days and once he returned back to work his spot has been filled. There is literally an army of unemployed immigrants out there looking for

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