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Immigration

Home Sweet Home for an Immigrant

Home Sweet Home for an Immigrant
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   6.58

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    humanity, socialize, unbearable, cramped, rent, running, dreams, ringing, adjustment, camped, vendors, guilty, certainly, section, heart, rough
     content words:    New York City

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Home Sweet Home for an Immigrant
By Colleen Messina 		  
1     Home may be where the heart is, but if you were an immigrant to America, leaving your old home meant heartbreak and a lot of change. Your new home in America would be quite different. It would also be very different than the homes of most Americans today.
 
2     Immigrants often moved into cramped apartments called tenements. These small spaces were a big adjustment for them. One man described his first home in America. His family had come from a beautiful area in southern Italy. He wrote, "The sunlight and fresh air of our mountain home in Lucania were replaced by four walls and people over and under and on all sides of us, until it seemed that humanity from all corners of the world had congregated in this section of New York City."
 
3     The average-sized home or apartment of today would seem huge to an immigrant. Even having an apartment for only one family was a sumptuous situation. Most immigrants had to have extra people in their apartments to help pay the rent. Five or six people shared a room.

Paragraphs 4 to 10:
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