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system of supervision of the alien, of advice, of protection, of education, based upon his special needs and his peculiar legal status, a system for his benefit, and incidentally for the benefit of the rest of us, a system supported by special taxes paid by aliens, and also, if desirable, by contributions out of the general treasury. Such a system could be rendered workable by lengthening to five years the period during which the government has the right to deport, though in our opinion in each case the right should be subject to an appeal by the alien to the courts. Given this right, however, the government might exercise over the immigrant the same sort of benevolent guardianship that the state now exercises over the legal infant. Not only could it provide special facilities for his education, but it could make the acquisition of a certain amount of knowledge a necessary condition of his continued stay in this country. It might advise the alien in every stage of his career, establish interstate employment bureaus, and constitute itself a clearing-house for information concerning industrial and social conditions in all places to which the immigrant might be tempted to go. It could do much to prevent the extortion and exploitation of the immigrant, and it could diminish that unequal distribution of aliens which leads to congestion, unemployment, and the aggravation of many social evils.

G. IMMIGRATION AND OUR FUTURE

246. The Economics of Immigration0

BY FRANK A. FETTER

The current objections to immigration are mainly based on the alleged evil effects to the political, social, and moral standards of the community. It is often asserted that present immigration is inferior in racial quality to that of the past. Whatever be the truth and error mingled in these views, we are not now discussing them. Our view is wholly impersonal and without race prejudice. If the present immigration were all of the Anglo-Saxon race, were able to speak, read, and write English, and had the same political sentiments and capacities as the earlier population, the validity of our present conclusions would be unaffected.

When our policy of unrestricted immigration is thus opposed to the interests of the mass of the people, its continuation in a democracy where universal manhood suffrage prevails is possible

"Adapted from "Population or Prosperity," in The American Economic Review, III, No. 1, Supplement, 13-16. Copyright (1912).

only because of a remarkable complexity of ideas, sentiments, and interests, neutralizing each other and paralyzing action. The American sentiment in favor of the open door to the oppressed of all lands is a part of our national heritage. The wish to share with others the blessings of freedom and of economic plenty is the product of many generations of American experience. The policy had mainly an economic basis; land was here a free good on the margin of a vast frontier. Most citizens benefited by a growing population. But the open door policy is vain to relieve the condition of the masses of other lands. Emigration from overcrowded countries, with the rarest exceptions, leaves no permanent gaps. Natural increase quickly fills the ranks of an impoverished peasantry. Lands whose people are in economic misery must improve their own industrial organization, elevate their standards of living, and limit their numbers. If they go on breeding multitudes which find an unhindered outlet in continuous migration to more fortunate lands, they can at last but drag others down to their own unhappy economic level.

The pride of immigrants and of their children, sometimes to the second and third generations, is another strong force opposing restriction. Immigrants, having become citizens, are proud of the race of their origin, and resent restriction as a reflection upon themselves and their people.

A strong commercial motive operates in the most influential class of employers in favor of the continuance of immigration. From the beginning of our history, proprietors and employers have looked with friendly eyes upon the supplies of comparatively cheap. labor coming from abroad. Large numbers of immigrants or of their children have been able soon, in the conditions of the times, to become proprietors and employers. Thus was hastened the peopling of the wilderness. The interest of these classes harmonized to a certain point with the public interest; but likewise it was in some respects in conflict with the abiding welfare of the whole nation. It encouraged much defective immigration from Europe.

The immigration from Europe has furnished an ever changing group of workers moderating the rate of wages which employers otherwise would have had to pay. The continual influx of cheap labor has aided in imparting values to all industrial opportunities. A large part of these gains have been in the trade, manufactures, and real estate of cities as these have taken and retained an ever growing share of the immigrants. Successive waves of immigration, composed of different races, have been ready to fill the ranks of the unskilled workers at meager wages. This continuous inflow has

in many industries come to be looked upon as an indispensable part of the labor supply. Conditions of trade, methods of manufacturing, prices, profits, and the capital value of the enterprises have become adjusted to the fact. Hence results one of those illusions cherished by the practical world when it identifies its own profits with the public welfare. Without immigration, it is said, the supply of labor would not be equal to the demand. It would not at the present wages. Supply and demand have reference to a certain price. At a higher wage the amount of labor offered and the amount demanded will come to an equality. This would temporarily curtail profits, and other prices would, after readjustment, be in a different ratio to wages. Such a prospect is most displeasing to the commercial world, quick to see disaster in a disturbance of profits, slow to see popular prosperity in rising wages.

The labor supply coming from countries of denser population and with low standards of living creates, in some occupations, an abnormally low level of wages and prices. Children can not be born in American homes and raised on the American standard of living cheaply enough to maintain at such low wages a continuous supply of laborers. Many industries and branches of industry in America are thus parasitical. A condition essentially pathological has come to be looked upon as normal. It is the commercial ideal which imposes itself upon the minds of men in other circles.

What tremendous forces are combined in favor of a policy of unrestricted immigration: sentiment and business, generosity, selfishness, laborers, employers. All men are prone to view immigration in its details, not in its entirety. They see this or that individual or class advantage, not the larger national welfare. The interests of capitalists and of the newly arriving immigrants are abundantly considered; the interests of the mass of the people now here are overlooked.

247. The Immigrant an Industrial Peasant?11

BY H. G. WELLS

Will the reader please remember that I've been just a few weeks in the States altogether, and value my impressions at that! And will he, nevertheless, read of doubts that won't diminish. I doubt very much if America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much more do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of the coming years. I believe she is going to find

"Adapted from The Future in America, 142-147. Copyright by Harper & Bros. (1906).

infinite difficulties in that task. By "assimilate" I mean make intelligently cooperative citizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose upon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and certain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as they are going the great mass of them will remain a very low class-will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. They are decent-minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people, rather dirty in their habits, and with a low standard of life. Wherever they accumulate in numbers they present to my eye a social phase far below the level of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzerland. And, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its schools-which are as backward in some States as they are forward in others-in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any organized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses of humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. They are, to my mind, "biting off more than they can chaw" in this matter.

Bear in mind always that this is just one questioning individual's impression. It seems to me that the immigrant arrives an artless, rather uncivilized, pious, goodhearted peasant, with a disposition towards submissive industry and rude effectual moral habits. America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me that all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts him with dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and forces him to sell his children into toil. The home of the immigrant in America looks to me worse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is far less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral atmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the immigrant is a worse man than his father.

I am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of sentiment, which underlies the American objection to any hindrance to immigration. But either that general sentiment should be carried out to a logical completeness and gigantic and costly machinery organized to educate and civilize these people as they come in, or it should be chastened to restrict the inflow to numbers assimilable under existing conditions. At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America, in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in its feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities, is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern Europe, and converting it into a

practically illiterate industrial proletariat. In doing this it is doing a something that, however different in spirit, differs from the slave trade of its early history only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the "colored" population America has already ten million descendants of unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. These people are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected the white population about them with a kindred ignorance. For there can be no doubt that if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1500 were to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and decivilized descendants, he would find them at last among the white and colored population south of Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this mixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million today, in this torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the schoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found the possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a separation perhaps not so profound but far more universal. One sees the possibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western European origin, dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated proletariat from central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are being given votes, I know, but that does not free them, it only enslaves the country. The negroes were given votes.

These are all mitigations of the outlook, but still the dark shadow of disastrous possibility remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and confuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption, to complicate any economic and social development, above all to retard enormously the development of that national consciousness and will on which the hope of the future depends.

248. The Influence of the Immigrant on America"

BY WALTER E. WEYL

When we seek to discover what is the exact influence of the immigrant upon his new environment, we are met with difficulties almost insurmountable. Social phenomena are difficult to isolate. The immigrant is not merely an immigrant. He is also a wageearner, a city-dweller, perhaps, also an illiterate. Wage-earning, city-dwelling, and illiteracy are all contributing influences. Your

42 Adapted from "New Americans," in Harper's Monthly Magazine, CXXIX, 616-617, 620-622. Copyright (1914).

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