In fact, they have the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs at the lowest wages, but they do not realize it. Slaughterhouse work and agricultural labor are illustrative cases in point. Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle, dealt with immigrants in the slaughterhouse industry. But so long as they compare their American jobs with what they endured at home, immigrants are happy and satisfied. Moreover, they do not feel that America owes them anything. America took them in as strangers, gave them higher paying jobs than they had previously enjoyed at home, and treated them to the joys of democracy and freedom. What is not to like in all that?
However, the immigrants' native-born children realize that their parents are doing the worst jobs at the lowest wages. They are unsatisfied with that level of work, and hope to do better in their own lifetime. Most try, and many succeed over time in moving up the social-economic hierarchy. The American Dream worked for them. The American Dream is really important to maintain for fairness sake but also for the sake of social stability. We want the American Dream to work. However, some immigrant youth, rejecting their parents' low status, also reject the legal economy's options, finding in illegal work much more lucrative opportunities. They are helped in this respect by widespread feelings of alienation in their generation. The native-born children of low-wage immigrants are likely to feel, often correctly, that folks like them do not receive a fair shake in American society. For some children of immigrants, the thought that "America cheated and abused us" turns into, "but I will get ahead by foul means if fair are not available." In a word the children of immigrants are more alienated than were their parents, but the alienation is something they learned in the United States. It is not a cultural flaw imported from abroad. It is as American as apple pie.
Despite these repeated generational contrasts in our immigration history, the complaint about immigrant criminal surfaces again and again in American history. To what should we attribute that recurrence? Of course, immigrants commit crimes, but they do not commit them in greater proportion than comparable non-immigrants. Immigrants commit crimes that working-class people commit such as robbery, burglary, and shop-lifting. They rarely embezzle funds from banks or speculate on foreign stock markets with depositors' money. Therefore, if the share of immigrants in the general population increases, the number (not the class-adjusted rate) of robberies might increase in a locality, but the rate of embezzlement from banks (the number divided by the population) will decrease! If immigrants take over what had been an upper class neighborhood as frequently happens in invasion-succession sequences in urban areas, then the number of robberies and burglaries will increase in a neighborhood because immigrants are of the socio-economic level that perpetrates that kind of crime.