We have not had a vision of many peoples making one nation, but rather of a few people being worked for by others. Even kindhearted employers with “welfare departments” for their men have little realization of their immigrant workmen as future American people. In many cases the welfare provisions and company housing specifically do not apply to the immigrant force. The average American housewife does not think of the immigrant and her future in America when she needs a servant, but wonders what nationality will suit her best. I should like to ask how many of our housewives, even our suffragist housewives, know the attitude of their foreign-born servants towards America or how well they are fitted for citizenship? Are they regarded as a civic factor of any importance? The average American officer regards the immigrant as a trouble-maker; but how many cities compile their laws intelligently in a language the immigrant can read, so that he may not become one? It is the native-born American who must separate the wheat from the chaff before we can estimate the wheat and dispose of the chaff.
We cannot treat the immigrant as if he were something to be absorbed, automatically, by inevitable chemical reaction, in the course of time. He is a living, changing, creative organism, needing attention at every minute, and with something to contribute at every point. From the moment he arrives in America he needs the creative, aggressive attention of American institutions if he is to become a good American. What he gets, when he gets anything, is a chance to touch here and there American institutions adapted to a native-born population and barely fulfilling the needs of the native born. Take the case of the immigrant who arrives at Ellis Island and goes, let us say, to a New England mill town. Originally it was a conservative little colonial town of 1000 population with no large industries, and with schools, churches, and a library adapted to the population. The introduction of several factories increases the population fourfold, and 75 per cent of the newcomers are foreign born, needing especially to profit by the organized institutions of America. But what really happens is that the institutions adapted to the original 1000 native Americans remain exactly the same—schools, churches, library, court, and houses, for the host of new Americans to fit into them as best they can. In other words, although immigrants may make up from one half to two thirds of that town they do not figure 10 per cent in its activities or 10 per cent in its government or its facilities.
The native-born American has set up some very important and flourishing institutions to perpetuate the ideals of Americanism and to preserve the things dear to him. These have come also to be regarded as the institutions for Americanizing the immigrant. If they Americanize our native-born youth, why not our foreign-born peoples? The native American has adapted them to his own needs and assumes that they will do for every one. Will they, without any further attention on his part?
The public school comes first. It is the first aid to the nation. It also represents a fundamental principle and obligation in American civilization. Of the 13,000,000 men and women born in other lands, 3,000,000 of them were unable to speak English, according to the 1910 census, and only 38,000 were enrolled in our public schools to learn it. Many important communities, in such important industrial states as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, where the population is at least one half immigrant, do not maintain any classes whatever where English can be learned.
Even where night schools exist, they are likely to be conducted in an experimental or detached way—as a benevolent “extension” of the public educational system rather than as a legitimate, highly important, and necessary part of public policy. In a city in which 75 per cent of the population is either foreign born or of foreign parentage, the president of the board of education said this year: “More night schools for foreigners—well, I don’t know. I am highly interested in the technical night high schools. If there is any money left after these are fully organized, I will see that it goes into classes for English to foreigners.”
But there never is anything left. On that basis we shall get nowhere. If the alien is to be taught English in this country only after every form of education life is “fully organized”—he will by that time have reached the point where he either cannot or will not be taught. When will America learn that teaching immigrants English and requiring them to learn it is a fundamental necessity, a condition of national vitality?
The Bureau of Naturalization is publishing a statement that during the past year 600 cities have conducted, initiated, or largely extended night-school instruction for aliens. With the usual optimism we point with pride to what America is doing with the native-American taxpayer’s money. Do we not want to know how effective it is? In how many of these 600 cities has this night-school work been put on a basis adequate to the numbers of the foreign-born population? In how many of the 600 has a really adequate system of instruction been worked out—adapted to the needs, trades, shifts, hours of the men, providing for proper classification, textbooks, teachers with vigor and understanding? How long have the terms been and did the immigrants attend?
We should naturally expect New England to lead in this phase of an Americanization policy. According to the data gathered by the Bureau of Education in 1915, Maine had 15 towns with over 1000 foreign born in the population, with no evening schools. Massachusetts had 28, New Hampshire and Vermont each 6, and Rhode Island 4. In Connecticut there are 15 towns with a foreign-born population of over 1000 that have no evening school or other municipal provision for learning citizenship and English. There is no town in the state that has adequate or anything like adequate provisions for this. Yet New Haven has approximately 50,000 foreign born, Bridgeport 40,000, Hartford 35,000, Meriden 10,000, Waterbury 25,000, Stamford 12,000. Concerning Connecticut the lament of nativism that the “State is rapidly being foreignized” is coming loud and strong. And it is true. How, with the situation described above, could it be otherwise?
For the immigrant in the courts our cherished “equality before the law” is not realized. There have been a great many studies and investigations into the “immigrant’s influence on crime” and his responsibility for this or that percentage of it. But there has never been a constructive effort to make the machinery of the law adaptable to the immigrant. With thoroughgoing nativism, the native-born Americans have set up the kinds of courts they need for themselves, and have installed forms of procedure that they know and understand. They proceed on the assumption that every man knows the law, and that every man can tell his tale in English. These assumptions were justified, back in the days when our courts were founded. A man used to the town-meeting scheme of government knew of what government consisted and what it entailed. In answer to requests for interpreters, for the distribution of information concerning laws, for modifications of judgments where ignorance was the cause of the violation, we are constantly met with the unsympathetic statement that if the system is good enough for Americans and for America, it is good enough for the Italians and the Germans and the Irish and the Jews and the Russians. We so seldom think of laws and courts as educational, as incentives to right doing, but always as punitive, even though this may be the immigrant’s first contact with this leading American institution.
An immigrant lands in America and gets whatever work he can. He does not know, and no governmental agency takes the trouble to tell him, what particular restrictions there are on any given occupation. No one explains to him for which job he has to have a license or which occupations are open only to citizens. He does not know our ordinances about the disposal of garbage or ashes. He may come from a region where there are no free schools, and he does not know that the law in this country obliges him to send his children to school. Unwittingly, with the best intentions in the world, he may offend in almost every relation of his life. Suppose that he does offend and is brought into court. If he cannot speak English, he is supposed to rely on the court interpreter. In many places there is no court interpreter. In Chicago, a short time ago, an investigation of courts disclosed the fact that the judge sometimes had to order volunteer interpreters to leave the room because they were interpreting wrongly time after time. The judges stated that there were a few men of that kind who made a practice of hanging around the courts and interpreting wrongly whenever it was to their advantage to do so.