After the nominations, when my talk with tenement women turned to politics, I used to ask for an opinion of the nominees. Speaking of the man chosen by the Democrats they would reply:
“Seems like they might’ve done better’n get a man who’d divorced the mother of his children. Don’t look right to me.”
Political parties, take notice! The tenement woman has a vote.
CHAPTER XX
A PEST-HOUSE?
In a preceding chapter I stated my conviction that in the district I covered as inspector of dog licenses there were representatives from every nationality on the globe. Now there are a considerable number of nationalities on the globe. Start to count and one will find the fingers of both hands used up hardly before the enumeration is well begun.
In spite of the self-evidence of this fact, persons proclaiming themselves as interested in “our immigration problem” are continually asking me:
“What do you think about our immigration problem? You’ve lived in the tenements and seen things first-hand. Which nationality do you think we should let in, and which shut out?” They speak so eagerly, are so confident of my ability to answer intelligently such simple questions.
Simple questions! Though I consider my district a fair slice of New York, I know that New York now contains only a small portion of the foreign riffraff that has been deluging the country for the past forty years. As I saw conditions in the slums of New York, the United States has no immigration problem.
Its immigration problem ceased to exist twenty years ago—it became an emergency. It is all very well to talk about the United States as an asylum for the oppressed peoples of the earth. That is a beautiful thought. But the asylum that admits every applicant, regardless of his or her mental or physical condition, soon becomes a pest-house.
Pest-house is what our country is rapidly becoming. Indeed I am not entirely sure that it does not already deserve that name. If it does not, at least it is so infested with the germs of virulent diseases that its doors should be closed until every suspected inmate is thoroughly fumigated. And that operation will consume several years.