In other states, however, aliens are practically prohibited from holding land at all or may hold it only for a limited period. In still others, no alien can acquire land, except by inheritance or in payment of debt. The laws vary greatly in the various states. Non-resident alien heirs are placed in a difficult position. In several states they are allowed to take only with the limitation that they sell within a certain time. If land in California falls to an alien not capable of taking title to it, it is sold for his benefit; in Illinois non-resident heirs are excluded altogether.
The restriction of landholding to citizens is a fundamentally sound measure of national defense. It is not sound unless it is uniform in all states, and in view of our growing international importance and impossibility of isolation from the world, there should be a national policy in this regard wholly governed by international agreement and national law. The holding of land also bears a vital relation to our various schemes for colonizing aliens, opening of reservations, and issuing of rural credits, and should be considered in these connections.
Some of the recent so-called insurance laws show the same tendencies to discriminations. The workmen’s compensation laws now in force in the United States affect the alien in several ways. The most evident is the discrimination against alien beneficiaries that limit the amount that may be paid to non-resident dependents. Connecticut gives such a dependent only half of what a resident would receive, and Kansas names $750 as the maximum a non-resident may receive, although a resident may receive a sum varying from $1200 to $3600. In some states installments are commuted to a lump sum if paid to a non-resident, and in Nebraska this may amount to only two thirds of the sum total of the installments; in New York it may amount to only one half, while lump-sum payments by the railroads engaged in interstate commerce may amount only to one year’s wages.
Another form of discrimination is found in the determination of who are “dependents.” Three states in the case of non-resident aliens limit to the closest relationships those who may be considered dependents. Three others present the extreme situation of refusing to recognize non-resident alien dependents at all. If an immigrant workman is killed in any one of these states, even his closest relatives in Austria or Italy have no standing under this law.
Aliens are excluded in Illinois and New York from the benefits of the mothers’ pension laws; and there is a tendency to make citizenship a requirement in plans proposed or put into operation for the welfare of the unemployed. In the law passed in Idaho last year, requiring the county commissioners to provide work on the public highways or elsewhere for unemployed men, only citizens of the United States were entitled to apply for work. In other words if two men contribute equally to producing wealth for the state, the citizen may work and receive state funds to keep him from starving, while the alien must get out or starve. The state is done with him, when it has no work for him to do.
In other states an alien cannot be an executor, administrator, or guardian, a provision which often hampers the settlement of the estate of an alien whose close friends and relatives are often aliens. There are other examples of discrimination in the enjoyment of personal rights and privileges. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey an alien is not allowed to have a rifle or shotgun in his possession—nominally in order that game may be protected. A law that went into effect this summer in Pennsylvania goes even further; it prohibits an alien from owning or having in his possession any kind of dog. The constitutionality of this law is soon to be tested.
One cannot read the hundreds of discriminating laws without a sense of the utter prostitution of American citizenship to prejudice, race hatred, greed, cupidity, and to the selfishness of groups and individuals. Men in power set themselves above the nation and seek to make that power secure by controlling at will the means of subsistence of other men. By all means let us have a complete national defense in which the lives, land, and jobs of citizens shall be secured, but let us have it by statesmanship and national law and international agreement, so we may fight in the open for what we believe in and not support indefensible citizenship legislation lobbied through the legislatures by class interests.
And now we face a new situation which bids fair to upset all our citizenship plans. Some industries are taking the stand that they will only promote men who are citizens or who have applied for their first papers. In this attitude employers are moved by two considerations—patriotism and the need for national preparedness and a realization of their responsibility; and second, the need for an improved and more stable labor supply and a reduction in accidents among English-speaking men. The Packard Motor Car Company in making its announcement said:
“We have in our organization almost 100 different peoples. We have Germans, Italians, Austrians, French, Polish—whose sympathies are divided as regards the war at present raging in Europe. We have a babel of tongues and an endless variety of races and nationalities.
“Our workmen are divided into cliques thereby. Their sympathies are with the lands that gave them birth. They forget our national ideals. To my mind this is a source of danger not only to the company, but to the whole country. The conditions of the average American factory are the conditions of this country. We have no unified people, as in France, in Germany, or in other countries.