On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

It takes neither figures nor close investigation to discover that in spite of the constant inflow of foreigners, the standard of living is rising continually; that the luxuries of yesterday are the comforts and necessities of to-day; and that in a larger measure than ever, it is true that the masses, if they have not reached this plane, are constantly at work trying to reach it. To blame the immigrant for the slums and the sweat-shops rests also upon pure assumption. It is indisputably true that the “slum” was always more or less here and that it is found wherever poverty and vice have met each other.

The immigrant moves into wretched houses and narrow streets and alleys because they are here. American citizens draw revenue from death traps and do it without a twinge of conscience; but even then these places are not slums. I venture to assert that in the real slums of American cities, the native Americans, using the word native in its true sense, outnumber these foreigners with whom we always associate the slums, with their grim twins—Poverty and Vice.

Only degenerate people sink into slums; and these foreigners have helped to regenerate them. In Chicago the first Ghetto developed in a quarter which could truly be called slums; full of dives in which the foulest vice flourished. Nearly all the women in those dens, and there must have been hundreds of them, were native Americans, or came from what we call the better immigrant stock, Germans and Scandinavians. On one side of this Ghetto was the most congested railroad district in the United States; on the other side as foul a slum as ever disgraced any city; but the Jew did not sink into the mire. He lifted that district out of it, so that to-day it is practically empty of that kind of vice.

There is no doubt that in the last few years, the army of unfortunate women and gamblers has received recruits from among recent immigrants, and there is also no doubt that the number will still increase; but the stock, the root, the peculiar kind of decayed house and people which we call slum, is a native product. Most of the Slavs who come here do not know anything about the business of prostitution or gambling; and until a few years ago this was true among the Jews also. I am willing to assert that the people who are making these peculiar crimes their business, are ninety per cent. native Americans. This does not necessarily cast any aspersion upon the American people; for I can truthfully say that as a whole their standard of morality is higher than that of any other people I know. Yet it is true that the class of immigrants who come, peasants and labourers, do not import the slum, the brothel and the gambling house.

If I were sent out to-day to find the people best fitted to replenish our physical stock, to help in winning the wealth of forest and mine, I should not go to Paris, to Vienna, to Berlin and London; or even to Glasgow or Edinburgh. I should go to the very villages in the Carpathians and Alps, on the broad Danubian plains, from which our recent immigration comes. Whether we are in need of replenishing this stock, whether the wealth of forest and mines should be harvested as quickly as it is now, is another question of those many with which I cannot deal here. Taking conditions as I see them, granting that we need muscle and brawn, I can say very dogmatically that we are getting exactly what we need. The sweat-shop it is true flourishes because of this recent immigration; but gradually its domain is losing ground and the fighters at the front against both slums and sweat-shops are the New Americans, who are helping to solve some old problems and to heal some old diseases.

The claim that every able bodied foreigner who comes here is worth so many dollars to this country has been ridiculed. Count Aponyi, of Hungary, who claims that his country loses money by the withdrawal of this able bodied army of men and women, puts the height of our gain at five thousand dollars for every man. However that may be, this is true: immigration has had a direct economic influence upon the countries from which the immigrants come, an influence which is both for good and bad. In certain regions wages have increased nearly fifty per cent. The relation between servant and master has changed, and a note of independence rings from the guttural throats of Slovaks and Poles; while “strike” and “meeting” are two English words which have entered permanently into their vocabularies. The removal of so many able bodied men has left whole villages with but women and children; and while the moral tone of such regions has not improved, one cannot as yet perceive any economic loss. This is due to the fact that money comes pouring in which offsets the loss sustained by the removal of so large a population.

Nevertheless it is a fact that the governments of Europe most concerned still regard themselves as losers, and are taking steps to restrict the emigration of desirable classes.

It has been claimed by a certain member of congress, that the withdrawal of this money from America is an economic loss and that the American people should stop it; because the money goes to support foreign governments. The argument is both narrow and false. First of all it is true, that the immigrant has earned this money in the most honest way, and that consequently he has a right to send it home if he pleases to do so.

Secondly, this money no more goes for the support of foreign governments than does the money that the politician paid for the imported cloth of which the evening suit was made which he wore when he delivered that criticism.

Thirdly, the money sent home each year by the men who have earned it, is only a small fraction of the large sums which are spent annually by Americans abroad; money which in a great number of cases has not been earned by those who spent it, or has not been earned so honestly as it has been by those “hewers of wood.”