Decrease of the accident rate in anthracite coal mines Increase of the fatal accident rate in bituminous mines explained Novel experiment by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Unemployment cannot be reduced by restriction of immigration. Scarcity of labor not necessarily followed by scarcity wages: Immigration and Labor PART I SUMMARY REVIEW T is the purpose of this review to state briefly for the benefit of the busy reader the results of our inquiry into the various phases of the immigration question. Such a summary must necessarily be dogmatic in form. Every proposition is advanced here, however, merely as a theorem, whose demonstration is presented in its proper place, in another part of the book. It is recognized on all sides that the present movement for restriction of immigration has a purely economic object: the restriction of competition in the labor market. Organized labor demands the extension of the protectionist policy to the home market in which "hands"-the laborer's only. commodity-are offered for sale. The advocates of restriction believe that every immigrant admitted to this country takes the place of some American workingman. At the inception of the restrictionist movement, in the 80's and the early 90's, they were avowedly opposed to immigration in general. The subsequent decline of immigration from the British Isles, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries and the increase of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe have diverted the attack from immigration in general to "the new immigration" from Southern and Eastern = Europe and the Asiatic provinces of Turkey. Yet while the root of all evil is now sought in the racial makeup of the new immigration, as contrasted with the old, every objection to the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe is but an echo of the complaints which were made at an earlier day against the then new immigration from Ireland, Germany, and even from England. Three quarters of a century ago, as to-day, the only good immigrants were the dead immigrants. There is no real ground for the popular opinion that the immigrants of the present generation are drawn from a poorer class than their predecessors. It is a historical fact that prior to 1820 the great majority of the immigrants were too poor to prepay their passage, which never cost as much as $50 per steerage passenger; the usual way for a poor man to secure transportation for himself and family was to contract to be sold into servitude after arrival. The next generation of immigrants was not much better off. According to contemporary testimony, the millions of Irish and Germans who came in the middle of the nineteenth century were ignorant and accustomed to a very low standard of living. Since the races of Southern and Eastern Europe have become predominant among immigrants to the United States, the steerage rates have been doubled, the increase being equivalent to a heavy head tax. The higher cost of transportation must have raised the financial standard of the new immigration, as compared with the immigrants of the 70's and the early 80's. This inference is borne out by the fact that the percentage of illiteracy is much lower among the immigrants than among their countrymen who remain at home. Illiteracy is generally the effect of poverty. The higher literacy of the immigrant may be accepted as evidence that economically the immigrant must be above the average of his mother country. The complaint that the new immigrants do not easily "assimilate" is also as old as immigration itself. To-day the Germans are reckoned by courtesy among the "English speaking races." But as late as the middle of the nineteenth century the growth of German colonies in all large cities caused the same apprehension in the minds of their American contemporaries as the Jewish, the Italian, and the Slav colonies of our day. Statistics show, however, that the new immigrant races number among them as large a percentage of English-speaking persons as the Germans who have lived in the United States the same length of time. The only real difference between the old immigration and the new is that of numbers. To the workman who complains that he has been crowded out of his job by another, it would afford little comfort to feel that the man who had taken his place was of Teuton or Celtic, rather than of Latin or Slav stock. The true reason why the "old immigration" is preferred is that there is very much less of it. As stated, the demand for restriction proceeds from the assumption that the American labor market is overstocked by immigration. Comparative statistics of industry and population in the United States show, however, that immigration merely follows opportunities for employment. In times of business expansion immigrants enter in increasing numbers; in times of business depression their numbers decline. The immigration movement is further balanced by emigration from the United States. As a rule, the causes which retard immigration also accelerate the return movement from this country. It is customary to condemn the "bird of passage," but so long as there are variations in business activity from season to season and from year to year, the American wage-earner has no cause to complain of the immigrants who choose to leave this country temporarily while there is no demand for their services, thereby reducing unemployment in its acutest stage. It is broadly asserted by restriction advocates that the hundreds of thousands of Slav, Italian, Greek, Syrian, and other immigrant mine and mill workers have been "imported" by capitalists-in other words, that they are all contract laborers. This belief offers to the student of folk-lore |