Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island
In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure areas. Their peoples are too many in relation to the opportunities they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to the wage-earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the announcement that one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run its steamships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black Sea ports in order to bring immigrants direct to America from southeastern Europe without the expense of the long haul overland to Hamburg.
If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population, the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-pressure.
Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants who communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor, landowner, or contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed men, and can well afford to preach world-wide brotherhood. The professional man, sitting secure above the arena of struggle, can nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred. Throughout our comfortable classes one finds high-sounding humanitarianism and facile lip-sympathy for immigrants coexisting with heartless indifference to what depressive immigration is doing and will do to American wage-earners and their children. If the stream of immigration included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines of business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified to compete immediately with our professional men, even judges and officials able to lure votes away from our own candidates for office, the pressure would be felt all along the line, and there might be something heroic in these groups standing for the equal right of all races to American opportunities. But since actually the brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in generous views on the subject of immigration.
CHAPTER X
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION
There is a certain anthracite town of 26,000 inhabitants in which are writ large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000 sixteenth-century people into a twentieth-century community. By their presence the foreigners necessarily lower the general plane of intelligence, self-restraint, refinement, orderliness, and efficiency. With them, of course, comes an increase of drink and of the crimes from drink. The great excess of men among them leads to sexual immorality and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor mothers fills the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their homes barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan. The miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of the household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three-eighths of whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength rather than on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring nothing but brawn.