Mr. Robert Watchorn, the ex-commissioner of immigration, told me that after an address in which he minimized the problem of immigration, a well-known citizen of New York came to him and said that in twenty years Kisheneff will have its counterpart on the East Side.
One of the most liberal Jewish rabbis in this country, whose addresses teem from the most extreme optimism as to the future of his race in America, will be amazed to hear that because he was invited to preach the baccalaureate sermon in a Western state institution of learning, a large number of the class absented itself from that service. In commenting upon it, I heard one of the number say to another, in unacademic, campus language: “Tough luck, boy. They’ve invited a Sheeny to preach our baccalaureate. It’s an insult to the class!”
The fact that twenty per cent. of the students at Columbia University are Jews, has led a number of Western boys to say to me: “We won’t go to Columbia. There are too many Jews there.”
No less brutally frank expressions I have heard in the shops in which I have worked, and in hotel lobbies where I have loitered; so that while I may not regard the Jewish problem as the most serious in the general one of immigration, I certainly regard it as one of the most sensitive to approach and one of the most difficult to solve.
I usually ask four questions regarding every immigrant group, and the answer determines, in my own mind at least, the desirability of its coming to the United States. The four questions are:
First, Do we need them? By that, I mean, will they perform some useful function which is necessary and which the earlier comers cannot or will not perform? This is entirely an industrial question and can be safely answered only by the economist, who knows the field in all its bearings.
My conviction, based upon no such accurate knowledge, is that we most need those groups which live by their muscle, rather than by their wits; the toiler, rather than the trader. If my theory is correct, this would exclude many Jews; although I am sure that they have performed many important functions in the industrial sphere, both in the realm of manual labour and out of it. Some such discrimination seems to me fair, for it would bar classes, rather than races, and would affect equally other commercial people, such as the Greeks, Armenians and Syrians.
Whether or not this first question is fundamentally sound, of one thing I am sure. Half the ill feeling against the Jews would vanish if they would give themselves in any large numbers to the mechanical trades and to agriculture.
Second, Does the group which seeks admission have the same economic ideals which characterized the earlier groups?
This refers to standards of living as well as to standards of making the living.