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The Role Of Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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Coming over to a new country for the first time while leaving everything behind besides your family and your dreams can be nerve racking. However, the idea of having an abundance of opportunities kept it thrilling. This is the idea of the American dream from the immigrants point of view and in a way they received the complete opposite from America. In “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair he demonstrates through his characters what day to day life was really like for immigrants. They weren’t treated fair and were forced to live and work in dreadful conditions. Throughout this essay it will be discussed what exactly immigrants were pursuing when coming to America and how that was a false premise to their idea of the American dream. Since immigrants were labeled inferior to the rest of humanity, it made it impossible for them to follow the American dream. Immigrants came over to America to have a fighting chance, to …show more content…
In reality, immigrants would be pursuing the total opposite of what they had in store. These families would be stuck in the lowest class, pursuing the lowest wages and received hatred from everyone above them in social class. This meant having the worst jobs, living in the overwhelming conditions, and having no real meaning to your life. The whole American dream to immigrants was very misleading and untruthful. In “The Jungle” Sinclair demonstrates this false premise of the American dream by describing how the family in the story was beaten and they lost the game. In the sense, this means their American dream was down the drain and how life gave them short end of the stick. The American dream is supposed to be the land of opportunities and was just a false premise for immigrants. They received no love from America or from it’s people. They were dealt the toughest life in America and was never in their picture of the American

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