1910, approximately ten million foreign-born immigrants and twelve million of their locally born children lived in American cities. In most large cities, the children of immigrants outnumbered the children of the native- born. Furthermore, blacks had been migrating away from farms, first into the Southern cities, and then into the Northern cities.43 Unlike Europe, therefore, the United States, especially in the hard-hit cities in the 1890s, was not an ethnically homogenous population. Empathy, the psychological basis of the safety net, was much harder to generate under these circumstances, and
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Why america didnt provide social safety net
