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… CHAPTER VI THE IMMIGRANT In the poorest quarters of many great American cities and industrial communities one is struck by a most peculiar fact — the poor are almost entirely foreign born. Great colonies, foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, are separated from each other and from the distinctly American groups on national or racial lines. By Grossing the Bowery one leaves behind him the great Jewish colony made up of Russians, Poles, and Roumanians and passes into Italy; to the northeast lies a little Germany; to the southwest a colony of Syrians; to the west lies an Irish community, a settlement of negroes, and a remnant of the old native American stock; to the south lie a Chinese and a Greek colony. On Manhattan alone, either on the extreme west side or the extreme east side, there are other colonies of the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians, and, in addition, there is a large colony of Bohemians.1 In Chicago there are the same foreign poor. To my own knowledge there are four Italian colonies, two Polish, a 261 Bohemian, an Irish, a Jewish, a German, a negro, a Chinese, a Greek, a Scandinavian, and other colonies.1 So it is also in Boston and many other cities. In New York alone there are more persons of German descent than persons of native descent, and the German element is larger than in any city of Germany except Berlin. There are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice.2 No other great nation has a widespread poverty which is foreign to its own native people except in so far as it exists in distant colonies in foreign lands. Our foreign colonies are to an important extent in the cities of our own country. On a small scale we have…
