"A hundred years ago, a sensational novel attacking the meatpacking industry prompted Congress to draft the first federal food-safety laws. The author of 'The Jungle,' Upton Sinclair, was disappointed. He had hoped to persuade Americans to embrace socialism. For him, the important point was not that the slaughterhouses of Chicago were unsanitary, but that they were 'the spirit of capitalism made flesh'-a system in which 'a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.' The book's central character, a Lithuanian named Jurgis Rudkus, had come to America believing that through hard work he could grasp the American Dream. But he found that 'the whole country.. .was nothing but one gigantic lie.'

Rarely has a great novelist been so wrong about so much. No one now worries about the poverty of LithuanianAmericans. But many still worry about the health of the American Dream. Can immigrants still work their way up from the bottom? Can they become American?

Many fear that, for the latest wave of mostly-unskilled immigrants from Latin America, the answer is no. Some fret that the newcomers are too ill-educated and culturally alien to prosper or assimilate. Others are convinced that immigrant workers are horribly exploited or trapped forever in low-wage jobs. Both worries are largely unfounded.

Consider Alberto Queiroz, who crept across the border 12 years ago. After a stuffy ride in the boot of a car, he found his first job in a Chinese-owned clothes factory in Los Angeles. Workers with papers were paid the minimum wage, he recalls. Having none, he had to make do with $2.50 an hour. Though unlawfully stingy, this was much better than he could have earned back home in Mexico.

After two years he moved to North Carolina, a state that was then just starting to become a magnet for Mexicans. He picked blueberries for $5 a box, earning nearly $loo, tax free, for a 12-hour day. But this job lasted only two months, until the harvest ended. So he sought more stable employment, which he eventually found at America's largest hog slaughterhouse.

Smithfield Foods' plant at Tar Heel, North Carolina, turns some 32,000 pigs a day into hams and loins. Thanks to selective breeding and efficient, hygienic processing, American meat has grown steadily leaner, cheaper and safer, says Joe Luter, Smithfield's chairman. A hundred years ago, food ate up half of Americans' take-home pay; now it is only about a tenth, and no one gets trichinosis from Mr Luter's pork chops.

But is a slaughterhouse a nice place to work? Smithfield does not let journalists in, for reasons of 'biosecurity'. Human Rights Watch, a watchdog from New York, issued a report in 2004 entitled 'Blood, Sweat and Fear', which accused American meat and poultry firms of 'systematic human-rights violations'. Slaughterhouses are harsh and dangerous places to work, said the report, and illegal immigrants, who form a large chunk of the workforce, find it hard to defy abusive employers.

Mr Oueiroz takes a more benign view. Yes, the work is hard. The line goes fast and you have to keep cutting till your hands are exhausted. And yes, it is sometimes dangerous. He says he once saw a co-worker lose a leg when he ducked under the disassembly line instead of walking round it. But many occupations are risky. Taxi-drivers are 34 times more likely to die on the job than meatpackers.

Mr Oueiroz does not think Smithfield was a bad employer. Wages of more than $10 an hour enabled him to buy a house back in Mexico. Cutting up pigs was easier than picking blueberries, he says, because he did not have to toil under the sun all day. And when he had had enough, he quit and set up a taco stand with his brother. That was five years ago. Now he owns a Mexican restaurant. America, he says, is 'the land of opportunity'.

The meatpacking industry has changed dramatically since Sinclair's day, when pigs and cattle were transported live to city stockyards so that the meat would still be edible when city-dwellers bought it. Now, thanks to better roads and refrigerated trucks, there is no need to build slaughterhouses near where customers live. No pigs have been slaughtered in Chicago for years. Firms like Smithfield now favour rural sites, where rents and wages are lower. And the immigrant workforce is largely Hispanic, since Jurgis Rudkus's greatgrandchildren prefer to work in offices.

Those market signals

News about jobs spreads quickly through the Hispanic grapevine. The shift of meatpackers to the countryside is one of many market signals attracting immigrants to different parts of America. New migrants head not only for California, New York, Texas and Florida, but also for Georgia, Arizona, Arkansas and Oregon. Perhaps the most rapid change has taken place in North Carolina, where a technology and construction boom has sucked in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, swelling the Hispanic population by more than 1,000% since 1990.

In some areas, the newcomers strain local services. Cindy Evans, director of a county clinic for children in Raleigh, says the percentage of her patients who are Hispanic has leapt from perhaps 2% a decade and a half ago to about 65%. The clinic is full of bilingual signs. Next to one, someone has scrawled: 'Speak English!'.

Many native-born North Carolinians are uneasy about the pace at which their state has Latinised. Few of the newcomers arrived legally. Some join gangs. As in the rest of America, antipathy towards illegal immigrants, though widespread, is mostly mild and seldom violent. It should not be dismissed, however, since it is politically influential. In Washington, Congress is still struggling to reconcile rival immigration reforms-a House bill that cracks down on illegals and a Senate bill that offers them a path to citizenship. Throughout the country, populists echo and stoke their constituents' anxieties.

Fear of immigration is akin to fear of globalisation. Unemployment may be low, but many Americans fear losing their jobs to someone cheaper in Bangalore, or someone who took the bus up from Tijuana. Meanwhile, the benefits of immigration, like those of globalisation, are often taken for granted. 'Americans just assume they can have a pizza delivered for $9,' says Federico van Gelderen, a Raleighbased executive for Univision, a Spanishlanguage television station.

Accurately measuring the economic consequences of immigration is hard. Looking only at North Carolina, John Kasarda and James Johnson recently found that Latinos paid $756m in taxes annually and cost the state government $817m. That works out as a net burden of $102 per head. Anti-immigrant agitators will seize on this figure, worries Mr Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. But it is dwarfed by the positive impact of Latino spending in North Carolina, which he estimates at $9.19 billion in 2004. That translates into nearly 90,000 new jobs, he says.

The worry that America is importing a new Hispanic underclass, as some claim, is also probably unfounded. Granted, foreign-born Hispanics are less educated and earn less than the average American. But that is hardly surprising, given that so many were until recently Mexican peasants. What matters is whether they are socially mobile, and it seems that they are. Although, by some measures of income and education, the Hispanic average is not improving much, that average is dragged down by a steady influx of poor Mexicans. A better way of gauging progress is to look at inter-generational differences.

First-generation male Mexican immigrants earn only half as much as white men. But the second generation have overtaken black men and earn three-quarters as much as whites. They enjoy more benefits than the first generation, too: they are twice as likely to have employer-provided pensions and one-and-a-half times more likely to have health insurance. And the adult daughters of Mexican immigrants, having learned English, are much more likely to have jobs than their mothers were.

Some economists, notably George Borjas of Harvard, grumble that 'about half of the differences in relative economic status across ethnic groups observed in one generation persist into the next.' Maybe so. But in absolute terms, Mexicans have grown much richer by coming to the United States. If they had not, they would go home. And their children are doing even better. Whereas only 40% of first-generation Mexican immigrants between the ages of 16 and 20 are in school or college, nearly two-thirds of the second generation are. Between the ages of 21 and 25 the leap is even more striking, from 7.3% to 24.4%.

For many first-generation immigrants, getting their children into an American university is the final proof that they have made it. Marco Roldan, for example, has been in America for 22 years but still has a Guatemalan accent and odd syntax. He started his career selling tortillas door to door. After many 75-hour weeks, he now owns a supermarket in Raleigh, where a mostly-immigrant clientele pays cash for Latin pop music, live tilapia and a wide variety of chillies. Mr Roldan is proud of his hard-earned wealth, but not as proud as he is of his daughter's MBA from Stanford.

Washing windows, watching screens

Immigrants' children are typically American citizens, having been born on American soil. More than 90% speak English fluently; by the third generation, 72% speak nothing else. Many help their less-fluent parents with form-filling, as other children help their elders navigate the internet. The parents, in turn, try to infuse their offspring with their work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit. (Latinos open new firms at a rate three times the national norm.)

Miguel Lopez, who arrived from Mexico when he was 17, says his children will have a double advantage over him. Not only are they native-born Americans, but they are 'native-born' to the information age. Mr Lopez is not doing badly himself: he owns a small window-cleaning firm. He woos customers by giving them instant estimates, which he can do because he looks at satellite photos of their houses online. His firm grossed $150,000 last year. With only a high-school education, he says, there is no other country where he could live so well. But his children will go to college, he says, and do something better than washing windows." (The Economist, June 17, 2006)