The Old World in the New / The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

by Edward Alsworth Ross

Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith split the people into unsympathetic, even hostile camps. The worst element in the community makes use of the ignorance and venality of the foreign-born voters to exclude the better citizens from any share in the control of local affairs. In this babel no newspaper becomes strong enough to mold and lead public opinion. On account of the smallness of the English-reading public,—the native born men number slightly over two thousand and those of American parentage less than a thousand—the single English daily has so few subscribers that it cannot afford to offend any of them by exposing municipal rottenness. The chance to prey on the ignorant foreigner tempts the cupidity and corrupts the ethics of local business and professional men. The Slavic thirst, multiplying saloons up to one for every twenty-six families, is communicated to Americans, and results in an increase of liquor crimes among all classes. In like manner familiarity with the immodesties of the foreigners coarsens the native-born.

With the basest Americans and the lowest foreigners united by thirst and greed, while the decent Americans and the decent foreigners understand one another too little for team-work, it is not surprising that the municipal government is poor and that the taxpayers are robbed. Only a few of the main streets are paved; the rest are muddy and poorly guttered. Outside the central portion of the city one meets with open sewage, garbage, dung-heaps, and foul odors. Sidewalks are lacking or in bad repair. The police force, composed of four Lithuanians, two Poles, one German, and one Irishman, is so inefficient that "pistol-toting" after nightfall is common among all classes. At times hold-ups have been so frequent that it was not considered safe for a well-dressed person to show himself in the foreign sections after dark. In the words of a prominent local criminal lawyer:

We have a police force that can't speak English. Within the last few years there have been six unavenged murders in this town. Why, if there were anybody I wanted to get rid of, I'd entice him here, shoot him down in the street, and then go around and say good-by to the police.

Here in a nutshell are presented the social effects that naturally follow the introduction into an advanced people of great numbers of backward immigrants. One need not question the fundamental worth of the immigrants or their possibilities in order to argue that they must act as a drag on the social progress of the nation that incorporates them.

ILLITERACY

Among us there are now two million foreign-born illiterates, while the number of foreign-born men of voting age unable to read and write has passed the million mark. The confessed illiteracy of the multitudes coming from southern and eastern Europe is 35.8 per cent., as against 2.7 per cent. for the dwindling streams from the North and West. We know that the actual state is somewhat worse than these figures indicate, because many unlettered aliens fearing rejection falsely declare themselves able to read and write. If the lands of ignorance continue to discharge unhindered their surplus into our country, we must resign ourselves to having numbers of fellow-citizens who, in the words of the Commissioner of Immigration at New York, "do not know the days of the week, the months of the year, their own ages, or the name of any country in Europe outside their own." Or, as another official puts it:

In our daily official duties we come to know as belonging to a normal human adult type the individual who cannot count to twenty every time correctly; who can tell the sum of two and two, but not of nine and six; name the days of the week, but not the months of the year; who knows that he has arrived at New York or Boston, as the case may be, but does not know the route he followed from his home or how long it took to reach here; who says he is destined to America, but has to rely on showing a written address for further particulars; who swears he paid his own passage, but is unable to tell what it cost, and at the same time shows an order for railroad transportation to destination prepaid in this country.

While sister countries are fast nearing the goal of complete adult literacy, deteriorating immigration makes it very hard to lift the plane of popular intelligence in the United States. The foreign-born between twenty and thirty-four years of age, late-comers of course, show five times the illiteracy of native whites of the same age. But those above forty-five years of age, mostly earlier immigrants, have scarcely twice the illiteracy of native whites above forty-five. This shows how much wider is the gulf between the Americans of to-day and the new immigrants than that between the Americans of a generation ago and the old immigrants.

Thanks to extraordinary educational efforts, the illiteracy of native white voters dropped a third during the last decade; that is, from 4.9 per cent. to 3.5 per cent. But the illiteracy of the foreign-born men rose to 12 per cent.; so that the proportion of white men in this country unable to read and write any language declined only 9 per cent. when, but for the influx of illiterates, it would have fallen 30 per cent.