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The Unfair Treatment Of Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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The Unfair Treatment of Immigrants in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Imagine going somewhere new, far away and ending up in a bad situation with no way out. That’s how Jurgis and his family felt when they left their home country of Lithuania to come to America to pursue their dreams of wealth. Their world was quickly turned upside down when they realized that the deck was stacked against them in Chicago’s unfair system, which was designed to leave them trapped. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair will bring you into the world of manipulation and poverty in Chicago during the 1900s. The big bosses of Chicago were suspected of sending agents to Europe to spread the tales of how much money immigrants could earn by going to America to work, “and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the …show more content…

Many immigrants in The Jungle were depicted as often unable to even afford enough food to feed their families on a day to day basis, to the point where some people went digging in the dump for things to eat, “ To this place there came every day many hundreds of wagon-loads of garbage and trash from the lake front, where the rich people lived; and in the heaps the children raked for food”(p231). When they could afford food it was often full of chemicals, watered-down, or not even actual food. “How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides?”(p86). However, the quality of the food Jurgis and his family were eating could be considered a small concern considering the other issues they dealt with, like their debt on the house. They were evicted after they missed payments on the houses they “bought”, resulting in them freezing to death in the winter, and the house being resold to another unsuspecting

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