Immigrants In The 19th Century

Watching news on TV every day we can notice a huge crowd of refugees trying to leave their country because of the difficult political situation. They are running from their lives hoping to find a better one somewhere in Europe. But not all of them are lucky to find a good place to stay. Most of the refugees live in the refugees’ camps where conditions are terrible. It’s hard for us, people living in peaceful county to imagine their living conditions: big, overcrowded and cold room with adults, teenagers and children in it. They are starving, they are cold, they are afraid and it seems that nobody wants to help them. This situation with refugees reminds us the situation with immigrants in America in the end of nineteenth century.
Thinking about
(“Statistics”). The biggest problem that these people faced in these tenements was poor living conditions. The rooms in the tenements were divided to numerous small rooms without any light, ventilation or water. All these rooms were filled with poor people who didn’t have money for a better place and better life. “While reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars” (Riis). This tenements were overcrowded in the 365 square foot apartment were living 26 families with no windows, no bathrooms and kitchens (“Shags”). So that’s why nobody was surprised about sick people and high rate of deaths. Only in New York in 1989 39,679 people died in the tenements because of the diseases (“Statistics”). In fact, in 1889 there were more deaths in the tenement houses than in prisons, hospitals, homes for the aged, and other institutions together (“Statistics”). Tenement houses had the highest death rate in the city, but this is not the worst part. In 1888 there lived 143,243 children under five years and there were 24,842 deaths among them
“A cholera epidemic in 1849 took some 5,000 lives, many of them poor people living in overcrowded housing” (“Tenements”). People who were living in the tenements couldn’t tolerate it anymore and started protesting against the terrible conditions that they were living in and asking government to do something. Finally in 1867, the government created a Tenement house act. “The Tenement Housing Act of 1867 legally defined a tenement for the first time and set construction regulations; among these were the requirement of one toilet (or privy) per 20 people” (“Tenements”). But the difference was very small. After this act there was small improvements but most of the tenement owners didn’t follow the rules and the situation in the tenements returned to the situation that it used to be. The owners just continued to put huge groups of people in one room to get more money from