America has been the great inspirer of the world.
Since the dawn of the twentieth century more than 10,500,000 immigrants have entered the United States. Through the pressure of economic conditions a large proportion of immigrants and their children are forced into the centers of poverty, crime and disease, the slum districts of our great cities, and into huge colonies in industrial centers where they both receive and contribute to conditions that have become pathological for the community, real sources of infection, both mental and physical. It is therefore not surprising to find that the children of immigrants reared in American cities contribute twice as many criminals as the sons of native whites of native stock. Our great industrial centers show an enormous aggregation of foreigners. It is said that these contain seven millions of the Slavs, the Latins, and the Asiatics, and those whose racial background makes difficult the conception of a democracy and their assimilation into it.
We confront a condition of grave peril to industrial interests as well as to our national well-being when, in addition to the overcoming of racial background, we must add the retarding effect of the segregation of large foreign colonies in mining and industrial centers. Great numbers of these aliens do not expect to become American citizens, but are here only to accumulate sufficient capital to return. "Of all the immigrants now comingone-third return to Europe and two-thirds of all those who return remain there." These constitute largely a mobile migratory and disturbing, unskilled wage-earning class.
They therefore are unfavorable to assimilative influences and tend to establish in modified forms the standards and customs of the communities from which they have come. "The town of Windber, in Western Pennsylvania, has a population of 8000 persons and is the center of twelve mining camps. It was founded by the opening of bituminous coal mines, for which purpose 1600 experienced Englishmen and 400 native Americans were brought into the locality. At the present, eighteen races of recent immigration are numbered among its mine workers. The Southern and Eastern Europeans among them have their churches, banks, steamship agencies and business establishments in the town to which they go to transact their affairs and to seek amusement." "Another illustration is the recently established iron and steel manufacturing community at Granite City and Madison, Illinois, which has the distinction of being the largest Bulgarian colony in the United States. These two cities join each other and for practical purposes are one. Fifteen years ago its site was an unbroken stretch of corn fields. The original wage-earners were English, Irish, Germans, Welsh and Poles; then followed Slovaks, Magyars, a few Croatians. Mixed groups came next, Roumanians, Greeks and Servians, and later Bulgarians, until that group alone numbered 8000; later still, the foreigners were augmented by the arrival of 4000 new immigrants—Armenians, Servians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Magyars and Poles. Under normal industrial conditions the population of the community is estimated at 20,000 Here the various racial groups live entirely apart from any American influence."
The New York Tribune states: "It is a somewhat startling announcement that more than one-third of the adult male inhabitants of New York City are unnaturalized aliens. There are, according to the census, 1,433,749 males in the city, of twenty-one years or more, and of these more than 500,000 have not become naturalized. In the whole state there are 718,940 foreign-born white men of voting age who have not become citizens. It needs no argument to prove that this is not a desirable state of affairs, and that if perpetuated it would be mischievous, if not disastrous."
From the figures collected in an investigation of four months in New York City Night Court, it appears that 7.7 per cent of the women arrested and convicted for keeping disorderly houses and solicitation were foreign-born.
In New York City all the conditions created by immigration are enormously accentuated, for within itself and its suburbs it has a foreign population exceeding the whole population of Chicago.
"It is at once the largest Catholic city of history and the largest Jewish city of history."
Statistics furnished by the industrial department of the Y.M.C.A., based upon the census of 1910, give the proportion of two out of every three of the inhabitants of the following cities as foreign-born or of foreign-born parentage.
181,511 Columbus 104,402 Spokane
233,650 Indianapolis 213,381 Denver
116,577 Dayton 207,214 Portland
248,381 Kansas City 558,485 Baltimore
319,198 Los Angeles 168,497 Toledo
237,194 Seattle 423,715 Buffalo
100,253 Albany 267,799 Jersey City, N.J.
124,096 Omaha 347,469 Newark, N.J.
137,249 Syracuse 224,326 Providence
687,029 St. Louis 102,054 Bridgeport
1,549,008 Philadelphia 465,766 Detroit
150,174 Oakland 104,839 Cambridge
112,571 Grand Rapids 560,603 Cleveland
218,149 Rochester 670,585 Boston
533,905 Pittsburgh 125,600 Paterson, N.J.
301,408 Minneapolis 373,857 Milwaukee
129,867 Scranton 2,185,283 Chicago
214,744 St. Paul 106,294 Lowell
145,986 Worcester 4,766,883 New York
133,605 New Haven 119,295 Fall River