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At the time that Jacob Riis’ writings and photographs circulated wisely, one of the
most important debates in U. S. politics was whether or not to limit sharply the legal
immigration Europeans (and especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe) to
the United States. While politicians tended to be either pro or anti-immigration,
journalists and reformers often produced accounts of immigrants’ lives and urban
neighborhoods that could be interpreted as either sympathetic or hostile to open
European immigration.
In this paper, you are to consider how How the Other Half Lives, an early and very influential journalistic study of the new immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, might be used to support or oppose immigration.
Imagine in the paper that you are a young assistant of either,
1) a Catholic congressman from New York City who wants to defend open immigration,
or
2) a conservative Nebraska congressman arguing that immigration must be firmly limited.
Your boss wants to capitalize on the authority of Riis in a speech on immigration. He
instructs you to write a 1200 word essay using the celebrated photographs in Riis’ book to make a case for his point of view. The pages should present a clear, many-sided argument and telling evidence with little by way of introduction.
They will be a part of a speech he will read into the Congressional Record and should therefore be carefully proofread and written in a style accessible to general readers.
Remember that what Riis himself thought about immigration policy is not what matters most here. Opponents of immigration sometimes used racial arguments and sometimes used numbers, diversity and culture as reasons to oppose open immigration. Defenders argued both that Southern and Eastern Europeans were racially fit and their lives and neighborhoods could be improved.
