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To be a poor immigrant in mid-nineteenth century New York was to be a creature almost entirely at the mercy of mammoth social forces and fickle chance. Immigration from Ireland in the wake of the Potato Famine and from Germany following the unrest of 1848 had packed the city with more men and women than there were jobs or apartments to sustain them, a positive boon for industrialists who found that they could reduce wages to near starvation levels and still have plenty of wil