law of nations," that the individual may have the freedom of the world to choose his domicil, regardless of state boundaries. The enactment of the Chinese exclusion law signalized a reversion of the United States to the old doctrine of sovereignty, which invests the state with the absolute right to exclude aliens from its territory. In opposition to the cosmopolitan theory underlying the free immigration policy of the past, the policy of restriction has elaborated its own social philosophy in the following words of Mr. John Mitchell: To a large extent the progress of nations can best be secured by the policy of seclusion and isolation. By means of barriers which regulate, but do not prohibit, immigration, the various countries of Europe and America can individually work out their salvation, and a permanent increase in the efficiency and remuneration of the workers of the world can thus be obtained. By the maintenance of these barriers the best workingmen in each country can rise to the top, and the great mass of the workingmen can secure a larger share of the wealth produced. It goes without saying that this theory of progress can lay no claim to originality, "the policy of seclusion and isolation" having been consistently followed for many centuries by China. Without venturing, however, into the realm of sociological speculation, and allowing that if "every foreign workman who comes into this country takes the place of some American workingman" immigration ought to be prohibited, the unprejudiced student of the immigration question will demand proof that the premises are true. When a million workers are reported to be out of employment and an equal number of immigrants are shown to have been admitted during the same year, the man in the street is apt to jump to the conclusion that the new arrivals have dis'J. C. Bluntschli: Völkerrechts, p. 36. 2 Die Bedeutung und die Fortschritte des modernen John Mitchell: Organized Labor, p. 181. It is stated on p. viii of the book that it has been written in co-operation with Dr. Walter E. Weyl. placed the native workmen or the older immigrants. On closer scrutiny, however, this superficial conclusion may prove wholly unwarranted. To take but one illustration, the presence of a few thousand unemployed sailors in Buffalo during the winter months is no proof of an oversupply of sailors during the navigation season or of an overstocked labor market in general. The emigration of all Slav and Italian surface laborers employed during the summer in the iron mines of the Lake Superior region would not create a single job for the unemployed sailors in the winter. On the contrary, the reduction of the working force in the mines during the season which is most favorable for their operation would have the effect of reducing the volume of iron ore carried on the lakes, in consequence of which a number of sailors could be dispensed with in the summer. It is quite obvious that the effects, if any, of immigration upon unemployment cannot be determined by deductive reasoning. The same is true of the standard of living, etc. In order to bring to light all the facts respecting immigration, a commission was created in 1907 by an act of Congress. The results of the Commission's investigations will next be considered. CHAPTER II THE THE REPORT OF THE IMMIGRATION COMMISSION HE most valuable contribution of the Immigration Commission to the discussion of immigration is the conclusion that it should be considered "primarily as an economic problem." This statement of the question takes it out of the domain of conflicting, more or less speculative, social theories and permits of its consideration on the solid basis of measurable economic realities. Of the forty-two volumes of the Commission's report, thirty-one contain primary facts directly or indirectly related to the economic aspects of immigration.2 The Commission has unanimously recommended restriction of immigration, the only dissenting opinion being confined to methods of restriction. There are few people who will go beyond the conclusions of the Commission and undertake the task of examining the evidence, presumably stored up in its voluminous report. The lay public will assume that the unanimous conclusions were reached after mature deliberation over the evidence collected by the Commission. An illuminating sidelight upon the supposed connection between its recommendations and its statistics is thrown by ex-Congressman William S. Bennet's dissenting opinion, which contains the statement that the report of the Commission was finally adopted "within a half hour of the 1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. I, p. 25. a Volumes 3, 4, 6-28, 34, 35, 37, and 40. The remaining portion of the report deals with ethnography, education, legislation, etc., and two of the volumes are summaries of the whole. time" when, under the law, it had to be filed, which left "no time for the preparation of an elaborate dissent." It is legitimate to question under the circumstances whether the members of the Commission had the opportunity, amidst their manifold duties, to examine the manuscript of the forty volumes, which did not leave the printing office until more than a year after the Commission had ceased to exist. Apparently, they had before them merely the summary submitted for the Commission's approval by its experts. The unanimity of the Commission thus invests its conclusions with no other authority than the scientific weight of the statistical and descriptive reports of its experts. The most important part of the reports, viz. "Immigrants in Industries" (vols. 6-25), "was prepared under the direction of the Commission" by one expert, Prof. W. Jett Lauck (of course, with the assistance of a staff of field agents and clerks). The student is, therefore, free to judge the reports of the Commission by the same canons as other official statistical publications. The Commission finds: That the numbers of recent immigrants "are so great and the influx is so continuous that even with the remarkable expansion of industry during the past few years there has been created an oversupply of unskilled labor, and in some of the industries this is reflected in a curtailed number of working days and a consequent yearly income among the unskilled workers which is very much less than is indicated by the daily wage rates paid." That the standard of living of "the majority of the employees . . . is so far below that of the native American or older immigrant workman that it is impossible for the latter to successfully compete with them." That "they are content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory . . . and as a result that class of employees was gradually replaced." That the new immigrants have in some degree "lowered the American standard of living." That a "characteristic of the new immigrants is the impossibility of successfully organizing them into labor unions. Several attempts at organization were made, but the constant influx of immigrants to whom prevailing conditions seemed unusually favorable contributed to the failure to organize." That "the competition of these immigrants . . . has kept conditions in the semi-skilled and unskilled occupations from advancing." Every one of the preceding conclusions involved a comparison of the present conditions with the past. Still it is only as a rare exception that fragments of statistical information relating to the earlier period of American industrial history can be found in the numerous volumes of the reports of the Immigration Commission. No attempt has been made to utilize the vast statistical material collected by the State bureaus of labor statistics since the establishment of the Massachusetts Bureau in 1869. This is very much to be regretted. There is no other nation in the world that expends so much for the collection of statistical data and so little for their analysis as the United States. An index prepared by the United States Bureau of Labor to the publications of the State labor bureaus up to 1902 fills a volume. The data contained in these publications were collected at great cost during a period of years, but were for the most part published in an undigested form. This defect is the result of the prevailing policy of official statistical institutions to eliminate as far as practicable all interpretations of their statistics in order to escape the suspicion of partisanship. A Congressional commission, however, is free from such limitations, its very purpose being to draw conclusions and make recommendations which are of necessity open to controversy. A perusal of the single volume devoted to immigration in the report of President McKinley's Industrial Commission shows what a storehouse of original data is available at small cost in the files of official publications I 1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 1, pp. 38, 39. |