The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all of them with no “capital”—except their muscles and the potentialities of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized. But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek and Syrian and Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices. They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the facts plead—the facts, as distinguished from prejudices.
What is our so-called foreign-population problem?
According to the latest census there were in the United States, of our 76,300,000 population, no less than 26,200,000 persons of foreign birth or parentage. Of these, ten and a half millions were born abroad, while 11,000,000 more were born in this country of parents who were foreign-born. Since 1880 and up to 1901 no less than 18,000,000 foreigners have come to us. That is to say, counting in arrivals and births since the taking of our latest census, and making due mortality allowance, we have to-day a population more than one-fourth of which was born abroad or is of foreign parentage.
The anti-immigration crusade based upon these figures insists that the foreigners come too fast for Americanism to digest and assimilate them, that they will undermine and destroy free institutions. Also, there is the cry that these recent comers are of peoples less desirable than those that used to send their millions to us. The newcomers are impossible in point of numbers, undesirable in point of quality.
As to numbers—Our first, and last previous, great flood of immigration was between 1840 and 1861. In those twenty years about 13,000,000 immigrants came. Our population in 1840 was 17,000,000. Thus, the immigration was about 80 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901, the immigration was about 18,000,000. Our population in 1880 was 50,000,000. Thus, the immigration was not much above 35 per cent. Clearly, the present “horde” is numerically not imposing or alarming in comparison with the foreign invasion of half a century ago. Our country is still sparsely inhabited; one-third of its area is still absolutely undeveloped. If half a century ago, with the then comparatively limited and crude means of transforming the foreigner into the American, thirteen million foreigners did not “swamp” seventeen million Americans, how can the present lesser immigration seriously or permanently hinder the alert, democratically militant America of to-day?
Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and 1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000—502,000. The rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to 2,050,000—850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States. The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it was during the preceding great immigration. Further, the charitable and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not from peoples given to excess in drink—and drunkenness is the chief cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism.
Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics.
“But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality? Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum of Ireland and Germany.” They were “incapable of receiving American ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!
But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective, a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are poor—and poor they are—then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard; and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home, toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the best possible Americans.
From poverty and experience of oppression comes the most militant Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples that built the splendid civilization of the past—the civilization around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth.