- 1. What programs do we have today that could help Immigrants of the mid 19th century?
Medicare and Medicaid are definitely one of them, since people worked in very dangerous and dirty conditions which degraded their health greatly and rapidly. They also lived in very dirty and populated buildings (tenements) which encourage the propagation of infectious diseases. SNAP (food stamps) would be another one as these people worked impossible hours in very hard jobs on starvation wages (just like Walmart workers today) and such food assistance would have greatly made their living conditions a lot better and avoided immense suffering and sometimes death. Finally the Bilingual Education Act would have helped the children of non-English speaking immigrants to fare better in school.
- 2.Why were Labor unions needed and did they serve their purpose?
They were needed because without them, workers had no protection for their salaries and their jobs or strength to fight abusive employers (which were legion at the time just like nowadays). Unions allowed them to have a say about their wages, their working conditions and other practices and to force corporation-friendly governments to create and enact legislation to protect workers and improve their lot. Thanks to unions workers were able to force employers to improve their salaries and their working conditions and block retaliation against their union leaders.
- 3. What was the Tenement issue in New York?
During the industrial age in the USA in the 19th century millions of immigrants and rural workers came to New York and the rest of the country for better opportunities and higher salaries. In NY they were housed in very dirty, small rooms where whole families or several single men or women would be forced to extremely crowded small spaces. Many times you would have 20 individuals crammed into a single small room with little or no heating, very bad insulation, no toilets and no showers, no place to wash your clothes or no privacy whatsoever. A single toilet or a shower would be outside and would be shared by 180 people and such conditions created a whole lot of social, physical and mental health issues.
