The Old World in the New / The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

THE OLD WORLD IN THE NEW

Towards the New World
BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS, Ph.D., LL.D. Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin Author of Social Control, Social Psychology, The Changing Chinese, Changing America, Etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH MANY PHOTOGRAPHS
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1914
Copyright, 1913, 1914, by The Century Co. Published, October, 1914
Immigration, said to me a distinguished social worker and idealist, is a wind that blows democratic ideas throughout the world. In a Siberian hut from which four sons had gone forth to America to seek their fortune, I saw tacked up a portrait of Lincoln cut from a New York newspaper. Even there they knew what Lincoln stood for and loved him. The return flow of letters and people from this country is sending an electric thrill through dwarfed, despairing sections of humanity. The money and leaders that come back to these down-trodden peoples inspire in them a great impulse toward liberty and democracy and progress. Time-hallowed Old-World oppressions and exploitations that might have lasted for generations will perish in our time, thanks to the diffusion by immigrants of American ideas of freedom and opportunity.
Rapt in these visions of benefit to belated humanity, my friend refused to consider any possible harm of immigration to this country. He did not doubt it so much as ignore it. How should the well-being of a nation be balanced against a blessing to humanity?
Think what American chances mean to these poor people! urged a large-hearted woman in settlement work. Thousands make shipwreck, other thousands are disappointed, but tens of thousands do realize something of the better, larger life they had dreamed of. Who would exclude any of them if he but knew what a land of promise America is to the poor of other lands? Her sympathy with the visible alien at the gate was so keen that she had no feeling for the invisible children of our poor, who will find the chances gone, nor for those at the gate of the To-be, who might have been born, but will not be.