Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the wonderful wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group who elect him leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to America. Little do the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether is paid by the steamship agent for forming the group and by the employer to whom he delivers them. A forwarding business exists for sending penniless laborers to America as if they were commercial ware. Each leaves at home some relative under bonds that the laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points by his confederates, coached in three lessons on what answers to make at Ellis Island, and delivered finally to the Pittsburgh "boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-keeper, who is recruiting labor on commission for a steel mill or a construction gang.
The emigration of 5,000 Rumanian Jews between January and August, 1900, was brought about by steamship agents, who created great excitement in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about America. One authority stated to the Immigration Commission that two of the leading steamship lines had five or six thousand ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there was "a great hunt for emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is the chief occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary, Greece and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and 1909 the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average outlay of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of annual business to the foreign railway and steamship companies. That a monster of this size grows dragon claws with which to defend itself goes without saying.
CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA
Still, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest dividends. But for him we could not have laid low so many forests, dug up so much mineral, set going so many factories, or built up such an export trade as we have. In most of the basic industries the new immigrants constitute at least half the labor force. Although millions have come in, there is no sign of supersaturation, no progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow new mines have been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow them up. Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an efficient system under intelligent direction. Ivan produces much more than he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more profit for his employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to him, we have bigger outputs, tonnages, trade-balances, fortunes, tips, and alimonies; also bigger slums, red-light districts, breweries, hospitals, and death-rates.
To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of manna. For, as regards foreign competitors, his own position is a Gibraltar. When the European sends his capital hither, he puts it into railroad securities yielding from four to seven per cent., thereby releasing American capital for investment in the enterprises that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The foreign capitalist dares not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot well run such concerns at long range. He may not invade the American market with the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been designed to prevent just that thing.
ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST
Thus, so long as he stays in his home market, the American mill-owner is shielded from foreign competition, while the common labor he requires is cheapened for him by the endless inflow of the neediest meekest laborers to be found within the white race. If in time they become ambitious and demanding, there are plenty of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson. The "Hunkies" pay their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through the twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as one throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent received official notice to hire no man over thirty-five and keep no man over forty-five. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical improvement in ten years doubled its production per man by driving the workers. No wonder, then, that in the forty years the American capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp to rub, his profits from mill and steel works, from packing-house and glass factory, have created a sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly diminishing part leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, the system which allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has been maintained as "the protection of American labor"!
