Chapter 7

"Thus the use of prepaid tickets, purchased in America for the use of immigrant, increased sharply."
In the early 1890s it was said that 1 in 3 immigrant tickets were prepaid, then it increased to 2 out of 3.  Prepaid tickets are easier too use which makes sense why so many people chose to use them.  A family member who had already made it to America could easily send home prepaid tickets to get the rest of the family over.

Table 7.1 on page 186 showed that the greater number of emigrants were the Italians coming from Naples.  In 1880-1920 more than 4.1 million Italians entered the U.S., that number is overwhelmingly surprising! I'm glad that people years ago were keeping track of the vast migration and numbers of people entering the U.S. the tables shown make me think about it being an immigration Census somewhat.  I value the importance of the tables and like how they give numbers per ten years, so you can see the increase/decrease.  The Italians more specifically caught my attention because of their great numbers starting from 439 in 1820-30 to 1,109,524 in 1911-20.

When Italians came to America most of them were skilled artisans.  Artisans: Venetian glassblowers, artisans, merchants, actors, musicians, waiters, professional people, businessmen, seamen, and stone cutters.  Italians also were part of providing agriculture products such as silk culture, wine grapes, and olives.  Italians lived all around, but mostly lived in Delaware, New Hampshire, and Louisianna.

The immigrant banker was likely to be an entrepreneur who performed all kinds of services for his clientele and was able to do so in their common language.  The immigrant banker varried from ethnicity.  He would help send money to ones old country, served as a ticket agent, and many times ended up bankrupt.The immigrant bankers helped Italian immigrant farmers. 

"Many Italians, especially in the early years of mass migration, got their jobs through ethnic labor contractors, called pedroni." (Daniels, 196) Arrangements similar to this were also done by others such as the Mexicans and Chinese.  The padrone was a person who often exploited the workers.  A padrone system recruited and brought young Italian and Greek boys to America.  The Italian boys were street musicians and acrobats.  The Greek boys were fruit and candy vendors, and shoeshine boys.  How absurd for the padrones to exploit young boys in such manner, but thankfully they were not used for any sexual activities.  It seemed kind of odd to me that the boys were brought back as fruit and candy vendors, but if you think closely these jobs are still done today mostly by immigrants.  Not many immigrants today are musicians and acrobats.

Sacco and Vanzetti came to symbolize American anarchism.  One was a fish peddler and the other a shoemaker, they were both arrested and convicted for murder in 1920. (Daniels, 201)