Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

THE ALIEN

The immigrant alien has been discussed by the Anglo-Saxon as though he were an Anglo-Saxon “problem.” He has been discussed by labour as though he were a labour “problem”; by interpreters of American institutions as though man existed for institutions and for institutions which the class interpreting them found advantageous to its class. Occasionally the alien has been discussed from the point of view of the alien and but rarely from the point of view of democracy. The “problem” of the alien is largely a problem of setting our own house in order. It is the “problem” of Americanizing America. The outstanding fact of three centuries of immigration is that the immigrant alien ceases to be an alien when economic conditions are such as properly to assimilate him.

There is something rather humorous about the way America discusses “the alien.” For we are all aliens. And what is less to our liking we are almost all descended from the peasant classes of Europe. We are here because our forebears were poor. They did not rule over there. They were oppressed; they were often owned. And with but few exceptions they came because of their poverty. For the rich rarely emigrate. And in the 17th and 18th centuries there was probably a smaller percentage of immigrants who could pass the literacy test than there are to-day. Moreover, in the early days only suffering could drive the poor of Europe from their poverty. For the conditions of travel were hazardous. The death toll from disease was very high. It required more fortitude to cross the Atlantic and pass by the ring of settlers out onto the unbroken frontier than it does to pass Ellis Island and the exploiters round about it to-day.

The immigration question has arisen because America, too, has created a master class, a class which owns and employs and rules. And the alien in America is faced by a class opinion, born of the change which has come over America rather than any change in the alien himself. America has changed. The alien remains much the same. And the most significant phase of the immigration problem is the way we treat the alien and the hypocrisy of our discussion of the subject.

Sociologists have given us a classification of the immigrant alien. They speak of the “old immigration” and the “new immigration.” The former is the immigration of the 17th and 18th and the first three-quarters of the 19th centuries. It was English, Scotch, Irish, German, Scandinavian with a sprinkling of French, Swiss, and other nationalities. From the beginning, the preponderance was British. During the 18th century there was a heavy Scotch inflow and during the first half of the 19th a heavy Irish and German immigration. The Irish came because of the famine of 1848, the Scotch in large part because of the enclosure acts and the driving of the people from the land to make way for deer preserves and grazing lands for the British aristocracy. Most of the British immigration was the result of oppressive land laws of one kind or another. The population of Ireland was reduced from eight million to slightly over four million in three-quarters of a century. The British immigrant of the 17th century, like the recent Russian immigration, was driven from home by economic oppression. Only a handful came to escape religious oppression or to secure political liberty. The cause of immigration has remained the same from the beginning until now.

The “old immigration” was from the North of Europe. It was of Germanic stock. It was predominantly Protestant. But the most important fact of all and the fact most usually ignored is an economic fact. The early immigrant found a broad continent awaiting him, peopled only by Indians. He became a free man. He took up a homestead. He ceased to belong to any one else. He built for himself. He paid no rent, he took no orders, he kept what he produced, and was inspired by hope and ambition to develop his powers. It was economic, not political, freedom that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new.”

The “new immigration” is from Southern and Central Europe. It is Latin and Slavic. It is largely Catholic. It, too, is poor. It, too, is driven out by oppression, mostly economic and for the most part landed. Almost every wave of immigration has been in some way related to changes for the worse in the landed systems of Europe. Wherever the poverty has been the most distressing, there the impulse to move has been the strongest. It has been the poverty of Europe that has determined our immigration from the 17th century until now.

The ethnic difference is secondary. So is the religious. The fundamental fact that distinguishes the “old immigration” from the “new” is economic. The “new immigration” works for the “old.” It found the free land all taken up. The public domain had passed into the hand of the Pacific railroads, into great manorial estates. Land thieves had repeated the acts of the British Parliament of the 18th century. The Westward movement of peoples that had been going on from the beginning of time came to an end when the pioneer of the 80’s and 90’s found only the bad lands left for settlement. That ended an era. It closed the land to settlement and sent the immigrant to the city. The peasant of Europe has become the miner and the mill worker. He left one kind of serfdom to take up another. It is this that distinguishes the “old immigrant” from the “new.” It is this that distinguishes the old America from the America of to-day. And the problem of immigration, like the problem of America, is the re-establishment of economic democracy. The protective tariff bred exotic industry. The employer wanted cheap labour. The mine owners and mill owners combined with the steamship companies to stimulate immigration. They sent agents abroad. They brought in gangs from Southern and Central Europe. They herded them in mining camps, in mill towns, in the tenements. The closing of the public domain and the rise of monopoly industry marks the turning point in immigration. It marks the beginning of the immigration “problem.” It is partly ethnic, but largely economic.

The “new immigration” from Southern and Central Europe began to increase in volume about 1890. It came from Southern rather than Northern Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Balkans, and the Levant. There was a sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. In 1914 South and Central European immigration amounted to 683,000, while the North European immigration was but 220,000. Of the former 296,000 came from Italy, 123,000 from Poland, 45,000 from Russia, and 45,000 from Hungary. These figures do not include Jewish immigrants, who numbered 138,000. Of the North European immigrants 105,000 came from the British Isles, 80,000 came from Germany, and 36,000 from the Scandinavian countries.

Of the 14,000,000 persons of foreign birth now in the country, a very large percentage is of South and Central European stock.

We are accustomed to think of the old immigration and the new immigration in terms of races and religions. And much of the present-day hostility to immigration comes from the inexplicable prejudice which has recently sprung up against persons of differing races and religions. It is assumed that the new immigration is poor and ignorant because it is ethnically unfitted for anything different and that it prefers the tenement and the mining camp to American standards of living and culture. But the newly arrived immigrant goes to the mines and the crowded city not from choice but from necessity. He lives in colonies with his fellows largely because the employing class prefers that he be segregated and has no interest in his physical comfort or welfare. The alien has been a commodity, not a human being; he has been far cheaper than a machine because he provided his own capital cost and makes provision for his own depreciation and decay. He has been bought in the slums of Europe for his passage money and he can be left to starve when bad times or industrial power throws him on his own resources. The important difference between the “old immigration” and the “new immigration” is not ethnic. It is not religious. It is economic. The “old immigration” has become the owning and employing class, while the “new immigration” is the servile and dependent class. This is the real, the important difference between the “old immigration” and the “new.” The former owns the resources of America. The economic division coincides roughly with the race division.

When economic privilege becomes ascendant fear is born. It is born of a subconscious realization on the part of the privileged classes that their privileges rest on an unjust if not an unstable foundation. Fear is the parent of hate, and back of other explanations of the present demand for exclusion of the alien is fear. It is fear that gave birth to the persecution and ruthless official and semi-official activity first against all aliens under the White Slave Act and similar laws, next against the Germans, and later against the “reds.” An economic psychology born of injustice explains our present attitude toward the alien just as a different economic psychology explained our attitude during the first two and a half centuries of our life when it was the consuming desire of statesmen, real-estate speculators, and exploiters to people the continent and develop our industries and resources as rapidly as possible.

The “immigration problem,” so called, has always been and always will be an economic problem. There are many people who feel that there is an inherent superiority in the Anglo-Saxon race; that it has a better mind, greater virtue, and a better reason for existence and expansion than any other race. They insist there are eugenic reasons for excluding immigration from South and Central Europe; they would preserve America for people of Anglo-Saxon stock. As an immigration official I presided over Ellis Island for five years. During this time probably a million immigrants arrived at the port of New York. They were for the most part poor. They had that in common with the early immigrant. They had other qualities in common. They were ambitious and filled with hope. They were for the most part kindly and moved by the same human and domestic virtues as other peoples. And it is to me an open question whether the “new immigration,” if given a virgin continent, and the hope and stimulus which springs from such opportunity, would not develop the same qualities of mind and of character that we assume to be the more or less exclusive characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race. There is also reason for believing that the warmer temperament, the emotional qualities, and the love of the arts that characterize the South and Central European would produce a race blend, under proper economic conditions, that would result in a better race than one of pure Northern extraction. For it is to be remembered that it was not political liberty, religious liberty, or personal liberty that changed the early immigrant of Northern Europe into the American of to-day. His qualities were born of economic conditions, of a free continent, of land to be had for the asking, of equal opportunity with his fellows to make his life what he would have it to be. The old immigrant recognized no master but himself. He was the equal of his neighbours in every respect. He knew no inferiority complex born of a servile relationship. It was this rather than our constitutions and laws that made the American of the first three centuries what he was. It was this alchemy that changed the serf of Northern Europe into the self-reliant freeman of America.

The immigration problem was born when this early economic opportunity came to an end. When the free land was all gone, the immigrant had to work for somebody else. He went to the mines and the city tenement not from the choice but from necessity. He took the first job that offered. When established he sent for his brother, his neighbour, or his friend. He, too, went to the mining camp or the slum. Colonies appeared. The alien became segregated. He lived by himself. And he developed the qualities that would be developed by any race under similar conditions. He, too, feared. He was known as a Dago, Wop, Hunkie. To him government meant a policeman, a health officer, and an immigration inspector—all agencies to be feared. He slowly learned to unionize. He came to understand group action. He found in his craft organization the only protection against the employers, and in the political boss the only protection against agencies that interfered with his personal and domestic life. The immigrant soon learned that our immigration laws were shaped by economic motives. He learned that he was in danger of being deported if he did not work. The menace which hangs over the immigrant during his early years is the phrase “likely to become a public charge.” And this alleged reason for deportation covers a multitude of other excuses which can be used as it is used—as a drag-net accusation. So the immigrant feels and justly feels that what we want of him is to work, to work for some one else, and to accept what is offered and be content. For within the last few years the doctrine has become accepted by him and by the nation as well that the alien must not complain, he must not be an agitator, he must not protest against the established industrial order or the place which he occupies within it. This has heightened his fear complex. It has tended to establish his inferiority relationship.

Our legislative attitude toward the alien has mirrored the economic conditions of the country. Up to about the middle of the last century we had no restrictive laws of any kind. America was free to all comers. We wanted population. Western States pleaded for settlers. They drew them from the East as they drew them from Europe. We were hospitable to the oppressed. We opened our arms to revolutionary leaders. We had no fears. Experience had shown that the poorest of Europe, even the classified criminals of Europe, would quickly Americanize themselves under the stimulus of new opportunity in a virgin land where all men were potentially equal. For generations there was fear that the American continent could never be fully peopled.

But the free lands were all gone about 1890. The Western drift of peoples, which had been in movement since the earliest times, came to an end. Population closed in on the Pacific. Cities grew with unprecedented rapidity. Factories needed men. Employers looked to Europe. They sent agents abroad who employed them in gangs. Often they were used to displace American-born workers. They were used to break up labour organizations. The aliens were mixed to prevent them organizing. Wages were temporarily at least forced down. For some years our immigration policy was shaped by the big industrials who combined with the steamship companies to induce immigration.

Organized labour began to protest. It, too, was moved by economic motives. It secured the passage of the contract labour law, which prevents the landing of any worker for whom employment has been provided in advance by an employer. Organized labour began to demand restrictive legislation to protect its standard of living. But the country was not ready for restrictive legislation. Congress instead adopted a selective policy. We excluded paupers, the insane and diseased, criminals, immoral persons, and those who were likely to become a public charge. Later we extended the selective idea to persons who did not believe in organized government, to anarchists, and to persons of revolutionary beliefs. We now exclude and deport for opinions as well as for physical and mental conditions. The percentage of rejections under these selective laws was not great. Of the 1,200,000 aliens who came to the country in 1914 only one and one-third per cent. were denied admission by the immigration authorities.

The war stimulated the anti-alien feeling. It provided an opportunity for crusades. The press aided the hue and cry. In 1915 there was a nation-wide round-up of immoral cases. Thousands of prostitutes, of procurers, and of persons guilty of some personal irregularity were arrested all over the country. Many of them were deported. The demand for restrictive legislation was supported by many different groups. It had the backing of organized labour, of the Southern States, of many protestant organization and churches. It was strongly supported in the West.

The “literacy test,” which went into effect in 1917, requiring of the alien an ability to read some language selected by him, was the first restrictive measure enacted. Its purpose was to check the South and Central European inflow. For in these countries illiteracy is very high. It rises as high as sixty and seventy per cent. in the Central European states. With the test of literacy applied it was felt that the old immigration from Northern Europe would reassert itself. Our industrial needs would be supplied from Great Britain, from Germany and from the Scandinavian countries. The same motive underlies the recently enacted law which arbitrarily fixes the number who may come in any one year from any one country to three per cent. of the aliens already here from that country. This will still further shift the immigration to the Northern countries, and if continued as the permanent policy of the Government will insure a predominant Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Scandinavian stock as the racial stock of America.

Despite all of the Congressional concern over the alien and the recent nation-wide movement for his Americanization, there has never been any official concern for the alien, for his protection from exploitation and abuse, or any attempt to work out a policy of real Americanization. Not that the task is impossible. Not that it is even experimental. Australia, Brazil, and Canada have more or less well-developed agencies for aiding the alien on landing, for protecting him until he is able to protect himself, and for adjusting him as speedily as possible to new conditions of life. In all of these countries the aim of the government is to give the immigrant a stake in the land, to bring about his permanent residence in the country, and, if possible, to induce him to become a farmer rather than an industrial worker. This has not been done by agencies of distribution alone, but by conscious selection in the country from which the immigrant comes, by grants of land to those who are ready to take up land holdings, and by the extension of credit from state agencies to enable the settlers to stock and equip their farms. The policy of Brazil has been so successful that many colonies of Northern Italians have been induced to settle there who have become prosperous and contented farmers. In other words, these countries have consciously aimed to work out a continuing policy similar to that which prevailed in this country up to about 1890 when the immigrant drifted naturally to the land as a means of securing the freedom from the exploiting class that had driven him from Europe.

It is not to be inferred that our policy of hands off the alien after his landing has worked only evil. Viewed in the perspective of two centuries, it has worked amazingly well. The rapidity with which practically all immigrants rise in the world in spite of the obstacles of poverty, illiteracy, and unfamiliarity with our language is little short of a miracle. This is true of the older generation as it is of the younger. It is most true in the cities, least true in the mining camps and smaller industrial centres about the steel mills and slaughter houses where the tyranny of the employing class is most pronounced. For the newcomer speedily acquires the wants of those with whom he associates. He becomes dissatisfied with his shack. He demands more and better food and clothes. He almost always wants his children to have a schooling and to rise in the scale, which to him means getting out of the hod-carrying, day-labour, or even artisan class. And the next generation does rise. It rises only less rapidly than did the early immigrant. It increases its wants and demands. It finds the trades union a weapon with which it can combat the employer who seeks to bring about a confusion of tongues, a confusion of religion, and a confusion of races as a means of maintaining the open shop. As an evidence of this, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America is almost exclusively Jewish, Italian, and Latin in its membership. It is the most intelligent, the most social-minded, and the most highly developed labour organization in the country. The coal miners are largely men of foreign birth. They, too, have adopted an advanced social programme. The alien has found the trades union the most efficient if not the only agency through which he can Americanize himself. And in Americanizing himself he is merely doing what the aliens of earlier centuries who preceded him have done—he is seeking for economic freedom from a master class.

America is a marvellous demonstration of the economic foundations of all life. It is a demonstration of what happens to men when economic opportunities call forth their resourcefulness and latent ability on one hand and when the State, on the other, keeps its hands off them in their personal relationships. For the alien quickly adopts a higher standard of culture as he rises in the industrial scale, while his morals, whatever they may have been, quickly take on the colour of his new environment, whatever that may be. And if all of the elements which should enter into a consideration of the subject were included, I am of the opinion it would be found that the morals, the prevalence of vice and crime among the alien population is substantially that of the economic class in which he is found rather than the race from which he springs. In other words, the alleged prevalence of crime among the alien population is traceable to poverty and bad conditions of living rather than to ethnic causes, and in so far as it exists it tends disappear as the conditions which breed it pass away.

Despite the fact that our hands-off policy of the past has worked amazingly well, the time has come when it must be changed. Not because of any change in the character of the alien, but because of the change which has taken place in our own internal life. Economic conditions make it impossible for the alien, as it does for the native born, to become a farmer. Exploiting agencies are making it difficult and often impossible for the farmer to make a living. Land speculation has shot up the price of farm land to prohibitive figures. The railroads and middle men and banking agencies are putting the American farmer into a semi-servile status. He is unable to market his crop after it is produced or he markets it at a figure that ultimately reduces him to bankruptcy. The immigration problem remains an economic problem. It has become an American problem. The policy we should adopt for Americanizing the alien is a policy we should adopt for our own people as well, for when economic opportunity came to an end for our own people, it created not only an immigration problem, but a domestic problem. The solution of one is the solution of the other.

The alien will Americanize himself if he is given the opportunity to do so. The bird of passage will cease to migrate when he possesses a stake in the land of his adoption. The best cure for Bolshevism is not deportation but a home, a farm, a governmental policy of land settlement. A constructive immigration policy and Americanization policy is one that will:

1. Direct the alien as well as the native born to opportunities of employment and especially to agencies that will enable them to become home owners and farm owners;

2. Provide government grants, as is done in Australia, Denmark, and some of the South American countries, to which the would-be farmer or home owner can go for financial assistance. In Denmark and Australia any man who shows aptitude and desire for farming and who is able to satisfy a local commission of his abilities, can secure a small farm in a farm colony, fully equipped for planting. The grant includes a house and barn, some cattle and machinery, and sufficient capital to carry the settler over the first season. The applicant must provide a certain portion of the initial outlay himself. He is aided by experts from the colony, he is advised as to what to plant and how to care for his cattle. His produce is marketed co-operatively, while much of the machinery is owned either by the community or by co-operative agencies identified with the community. The land is purchased in large tracts by the State in advance of settlement to prevent speculation, while settlers are required to develop their holdings. They may not purchase for speculative purposes. The State of Denmark has planted thousands of home-owning farmers in this way and has all but ended farm tenancy in a generation’s time. The farm tenant and farm labourer have become owners. A similar policy has been developed in Australia, where millions of dollars have been advanced by the State to settlers. In both of these countries the land settlement colonies have been a great success. There have been few failures and no losses to the State.

3. The savings of the alien should be used for the benefit of the alien. Hundreds of millions of dollars leave this country annually in the form of remittances. Much of it goes abroad because of fear of American banks. Many millions more are in hiding for the same reason. The deposits in the Postal Savings banks are largely the deposits of the immigrant. They are turned over to the National banks and find their way into commercial activities. If these funds were mobilized in co-operative banks, as is done all over Europe, or if the Government would dedicate them to a revolving fund for aiding persons to build homes, to buy farms, and to aid the alien with credit, which he now has no means of securing; he would be lured from the city to the land, he would become a home and farm owner rather than an industrial worker, and would rapidly develop those qualities of mind and character that are associated in our minds with the early Anglo-Saxon settler but which are rather the qualities which spring up of themselves when the economic conditions encourage them.

4. Our deportation laws are a disgrace to any country. They are an adaptation of the fugitive slave laws. The offending alien is subject to lynch law sanctioned by the State. He is arrested on complaint by an inspector. He is then tried by the man who arrests him. His friends and relatives are excluded from the trial. The judge who made the arrest is often the interpreter and the clerk who transcribes the testimony. He also is his jailer. He can and does hold the alien incommunicado. Often the alien scarcely knows why he has been arrested. Often he does not understand the testimony. The local findings have to be approved at Washington by the Department of Labour. But the approval is by a clerk who, like the inspector, often wants to make a record. The opportunity for collusion with police, with crusaders, with employers, with Chambers of Commerce, and with organization bent on “ridding the country of disturbers” is manifest. Often men are arrested, tried, convicted, and possibly placed on ships for their home countries before their families are aware of what has happened to them.

The alien is denied every protection of our constitution. The Bill of Rights does not apply to him. He has no presentment before a Grand Jury, there is no jury trial, he rarely has counsel, and he is often held incommunicado by the official who has taken him into custody and who wants to justify his arrest. The only recourse the alien has is the writ of habeas corpus. But this is of practically no avail. For the courts have held that if there is a scintilla of evidence on which the inspector could act the court will not review the finding. And a scintilla is any evidence at all. When to this is added the fact that the charge “likely to become a public charge” has come to cover almost any condition that might arise, and as this charge is usually added to the others as a recourse on which the inspector may fall back, the chance of relief in the court is practically nil. Under the laws as they now exist the alien is a man without a country. He has no protection from the constitution and little protection under the laws. The alien knows this. He feels that he is defenceless. American liberty to him means the liberty of a policeman, a health or school official, an immigration inspector, and agents of the department of justice to invade his home, to seize his papers, to arrest without warrant, to hold incommunicado, and to deport on a charge that is often as foreign to the facts as anything could be.

It is this more than anything else that has embittered the alien towards America during the last few years. It is this that makes him feel that he is not wanted here. It is this that is sending hundreds of thousands back to Europe, many of them among the best of the aliens and many of them worthy in every way of our confidence and welcome.

A proper immigration policy should be a national policy. Not something for the alien alone but for our own people. For the immigration problem is merely another form of the domestic problem. When we are ready to settle the one we will settle the other. A cross section of one branch of our political State is a cross section of another. The alien of to-day is not very different from the alien of yesterday. He has the same instincts and desires as did those who came in the Mayflower. Only those who came in the Mayflower made their own laws and their own fortunes. Those who come to-day have their laws made for them by the class that employs them and they make their own fortunes only as those aliens who came first permit them to do so.

Frederic C. Howe