a) How accurate was it to reality? Were immigrants really arriving to America with trivial amounts of money and zero possessions? Did they have any family/friends already here that could give them money or were they truly a complete stranger? How much did the boat fare cost? I’m assuming many times more than 27 cents. If you could afford the boat fare, why couldn’t you afford to bring a little bit more money than that across?
b) What was the nuts and bolts of settling into America for immigrants with so little money? Like, how did they eat their first meal? Where did they find a place to stay? Were there charitable organizations set up in America to help them? How did they find their first job or money earning opportunity? How did they avoid all starving to death en masse?
Maybe I suffer from a lack of imagination or historical knowledge but, even in 1900, I’m having an extremely hard time figuring out how you could land in New York with $5 and not be dead within the week.
First off, you have to realize that the amounts were not as trivial as they are in today’s money. In 1900, $1 was worth about $30 in purchasing power, so $5 would be $150 and $13 would be $390. Not a lot, but a bed in a flophouse might cost 7 cents a night. As for meals, you could get a lot for under a dollar::
1899 Sunday table d’hôte dinner at Café Boulevard, NYC: 75¢ dinner includes Blue Points, Consomme, Cold Salmon with Sauce Tartar, Sweetbread Patties, Long Island Duck, Spinach, Escarole Salad, Kaiser Pudding with Wine Sauce, Demi-Tasse.
With the amounts quoted (well, maybe not $.27), you could last several weeks until you could find a job.
Some countries restricted how much money emigrants could take with them. My college roommate and his parents left the Soviet Union in the late 1970s with very little cash so they brought stuff to sell. (Remember those remote shutter release cables for a camera? For whatever reason, they were able to acquire a large number in Russia, so they had a suitcase full of them that they sold on the street in Italy, where they first landed.)
"Prior to 1885, American manufacturers would advertise in European newspapers as well as send agents to across the Atlantic to recruit foreigners. American agents would cleverly offer them to pay for their journey to Ellis Island, while others offered jobs and land under contract. In 1885, Congress passed the Alien Contract Labor Law, putting an end to contractual labor of immigrants which left many Americans jobless.
For an immigrant coming to New York City, getting a job was fairly simple. However, the jobs which they were given consisted of some of the dirtiest and dangerous jobs at a low wage. City jobs were different than jobs in the country or suburbs. Farming and mining was replaced with factory work, ditch-digging, burying gas pipes and stone cutting. In New York City, immigrants are responsible for digging the first inter-borough subway tunnels, laying cables for Broadway street lights, the bridges on the East River, and constructing the Flatiron Building."
In addition, there is a fair amount of survivor bias to this.
That some people managed to fair well or even prosper while coming here with very little doesn’t mean that all did. It just means that we don’t hear the stories from the people that ended up dead in a ditch somewhere.
I personally know a man who came here in the late 1970s with a grand total of $20, and who is now quite wealthy. He was a refugee, though, not a planned immigrant.
As for how he survived on that, the reason I know him is that my family hosted him and his family when they arrived. I’m pretty sure it was arranged through a religious charity.
Steerage passage cost an average of $30, a figure that held true for quite a long time, from the 1870s to early 1900s.
A majority, probably the vast majority by the early 20th century, were following in the footsteps of relatives or friends from their old community. They probably had a place to live lined up before they left. Same for jobs.
The ones who landed with ridiculously low amounts of cash may not have intended to do so. Steamships to America were only available from a few European ports. It cost time and money to get to those ports from the interior of Eastern or Southern Europe, where the emigrants were leaving. They may have underestimated those costs, needed extra money to bribe an official, been robbed or fleeced, or shared with or given money to others.
You’re right that these are survivors’ tales, but the entire system was set up to lure immigrants to jobs. Having them starve upon arrival was in no one’s interests. They may have been unbelievably poor by modern standards and their living conditions were barely above Victorian London’s, but even small amounts of money stretched much farther than we understand: the Marx Brothers’ family had ten people living in a small tenement apartment for $27/month. Having family was crucial, though; men living on their own had even harder times.
According to the ship’s manifest which I found through Ancestry, my grandfather came to the US from Germany in 1901 with $20. It did also show the name of someone in Chicago who I presume was a sponsor, but nobody in the family knows anything about how he got from New York to Chicago, or what he did when he got there. As far as we know he had no relatives in the US; his draft registration lists his mother in Berlin as his nearest relative. All we know is that he worked as a baker.
It was possible, but there were often a few unmentioned details. My grandfather came over in 1908 with very little. The only reason he was able to come was because he was sponsored - or apprenticed, if you prefer - to someone already here, so he was guaranteed a job and a place to stay.
I wonder too- that a lot of the arriving immigrants as mentioned had job offers/sponsors’ plus some I assume had relatives. However distant, relatives back then tended to help each other out, from a culture (many cultures) where kinship from a common home village counted for a lot more than in mobile modern America. Even without kinship, there were large immigrant communities for almost every ethnicity (especially in New York) and these tended to be willing to help a fellow countryman. The story “I arrived with $10 in my pocket” usually continues with "“I met a fellow who grew up a county over from me and knew my second cousin the parish priest. He gave me a place to stay…”
Even today - there was a Canadian citizen several years ago who was rendered by the CIA to Syria where he was tortured for 6 months as a suspected terrorist - because he’d met a fellow immigrant in Ottawa and agreed to cosign a mortgage for someone from the same country that he only just met. How many people would your average North American cosign for after meeting them a month or two before? Different culture.
My father’s parents arrived around 1920 with few possessions but some small amount of money. They had the name of a contact to provide work. They worked, and saved, and one by one brought over all of their siblings who had virtually nothing to bring with them. There were probably a few enterprising souls who literally had nothing but the clothes on their back and a few coins in their pocket but the vast majority of immigrants had family, friends, charities, or existing work opportunities waiting for them.
I guess I’m curious about the actual nuts and bolts of the process then like, I get off the boat, ok, so now what? Like, where do I go? What is my first meal? Where am I sleeping that night? How much money have I spent on my first day?
Modern retellings tend to elide over that and go from “stepping off the boat with $4.30, dot dot dot, 9 years later”. Are there any historical accounts that cover the problem solving of actual day to day living? Especially of the people who didn’t have a sponsorship lined up or a family that was sponsoring them to come over.
Not my grandfather, but my father. He came to the US from China in 1949 to open a sales office for a company back in Nanjing, armed with a bit of cash and a letter of credit from his company. Prior to his departure on 2/15 the thinking was that the Nationalists would be able to keep the Communists north of the Yangtze; by the time he arrived in San Francisco on 3/11 it was clear that the Communists had no intention of stopping and took Nanjing about a month later. His story was that soon after he got off the boat he was told that his letter of credit was no longer any good, so he was left with his steamer trunk and the cash in his pocket. Not sure how much he had; he had enough cash to take a bus to Wisconsin where his sister was studying pharmacy. He spent the summer picking peas and beans to earn enough to get to Pennsylvania, where a family connection had arranged a college scholarship for him.
Some of the stories about arriving with only $20 in one’s pocket may be true (although it’s likely that the new immigrant had a name or two of someone who could help – a cousin, or someone from the same town, or something).
And some of the stories are the kind of self-made man bootstrapping bullshit that’s been around forever, and is still around today.
Back in the eighties, I worked for a large magazine publishing company, on the business side. We all read Advertising Age, of course (does it still exist today? I don’t know).
There were always interviews with CEOs and prominent media execs, many of whom claimed to have started their careers in the mailroom and worked their way up to their current lofty position. Which was sort of true, because back when they started (which would have been in the late fifties/early sixties), big companies started off their management trainees with a stint in the mailroom. It was considered a good way to get to know the flow of information through a company, back in those pre-email days.
So, yes, they started in the mailroom. But they were management trainees, graduates of top universities, not some poor schmuck actually working in the mailroom.
A certain number of the “I came here with $20 in my pocket” stories are the same thing. There’s a grain of truth there, but not much more.
Nikola Tesla had his money and some of his luggage stolen on his trip to the U.S. and arrived in New York with only 4 cents in his pocket, so the story goes.
The Tenement Museum in New York (Which I highly recommend if you’re ever in New York) goes into this some. There were charities that helped newly arrived immigrants with those sorts of things, and now I’m forgetting what they called them. Others, as already mentioned had friends or family waiting for them.
The tour we did at the Tenement Museum had our tour group playing the role of a large Italian family just off the boat. Our distant cousin was supposed to meet us at the docks, but he didn’t show. Our tour guide played the role of a social worker from one of the charities I mentioned, who found us wandering around with our luggage looking disoriented.
Also, don’t forget that a lot of immigrants had a lot lower standards for food and lodging than a typical SDMB poster, and a lot of laws were looser then. You’d probably think of getting a hotel room or a meal at a restaurant, the broke immigrant with no real plan would be fine crashing in a flophouse or corner of a warehouse and eating food from a questionable source.
A friend of mine tells of his father who routinely says he arrived here from India with the clothes on his back and $20. My friend will point out that he had the clothes on his back, $20, and a PhD in chemistry.