In the measure in which we answer the first question so shall we answer the second. Let no one suppose that anything short of a national policy, purpose, and consciousness in which each one of us does his full share, will meet the critical need of the hour. We are agreed in the hope that America shall endure as a great nation; that we wish to preserve our free institutions and constitutional guarantees. We are also generally agreed that America shall rank in the world as a nation of vision, courage, ideals, opportunity, and achievement; and that, last of all, out of this democracy we hope to get the greatest amount of aspiration, happiness, and achievement per man that it is possible for a strong nation to have.
These are not to be achieved by inaction or by misdirected action. We are at the point where every act counts for or against the future of America. I believe our capacity for nationalism is in exact proportion to the measures we take for its achievement. The war has taught us that it cannot be left to the complacency of the native American or to the voluntary efforts of the immigrant. A general melting pot tended by no one in particular does not necessarily brew a nation. This is even more true when we find so many other self-interested nations and people stirring this pot. The war has also taught us that the demand for cheap labor cannot continue to be the chief determining factor in the admission of immigrants—because of America’s new interest in aliens as prospective citizens.
We not only have a present nation-size job of assimilation, but we need to prepare ourselves for the problems that will accompany negotiations for peace. We shall have at least three questions of great and far-reaching importance—incoming immigration, outgoing emigration, and citizenship status in America and abroad.
If the pending immigration bill represents the sum total of the wisdom we can summon on the first subject, we shall fail miserably to improve this opportunity by substituting a constructive policy for our prevailing negative policy. Such arbitrary tests as the literacy clause based on race and class theories and antagonisms bear no real or lasting relation to the fundamental national needs of the country. This country needs a statesmanlike policy in its international relations based not upon theoretical makeshifts, but upon a knowledge of existing conditions, upon capacity for assimilating the immigrant, and upon our power to develop the machinery which will make assimilation possible.
Admission of aliens to this country should be based upon their capacity for Americanization. Any exclusion laws should look to the raising of the physical standard, owing to the results of the privations and hardships of war, with greater emphasis on deportation for crime. I believe that every incoming immigrant should declare upon arrival his or her intention to remain here and become a citizen. Every immigrant should be required to become literate in the English language (the minimum standard to be definitely set) within five years after arrival, provided facilities are offered him. Deportation should be the penalty for failure to do so. With the probable increase in the immigration of women and children, every safeguard should be thrown about their admission, arrival, and distribution.
A policy of distribution should be worked out. This again requires three fundamental lines of activity—agricultural organization which will enable the land to compete with industry for the laborer and settler; the development of a rural credit system which will enable people to go to the land; and a national system of government employment agencies and the regulation of all private agencies doing an interstate business. All of the civic and stimulated “back to the land” schemes are doomed to failure until these three questions are solved. Industry will get the great mass of the immigrants as long as it offers higher wages, steadier employment, decent conditions and opportunities for advancement; and so long as, unlike agriculture, it has the organization to reach the aliens on or before arrival.
A policy of national education is required for a statesmanlike consideration of nationalism. Local communities cannot carry the burden of educating large numbers of incoming residents concerning whom they have not been forewarned and who have not grown up in an American community. The relation of education to seasonal labor is important. The great forces in Americanization are the home, the school, and the neighborhood. These cannot influence the itinerant resident, in one town to-day and gone to-morrow; in a factory this month and in a wheat field next month; in a city with its rule of civilization one year, and in a labor camp with only the most primitive rule another year; in a well-ordered home one week and in a derailed freight car the next. We must contrive that educational and cultural forces shall follow the man from place to place if we are to achieve nationalism through assimilation.
America has never had any method of protecting newly arrived aliens. This has been left to states, cities, philanthropies, racial societies, or to foreign governments. The alien is not only an international figure until he becomes a citizen, with all of the entanglements of dual citizenship and obligations abroad, but he is an inter-state and inter-city figure. Our industrial system and living conditions make him so. The average immigrant travels more in the few months after arrival in America than during his whole lifetime abroad. In the face of this, two cities and three states have recognized his disability and handicaps and have tried specifically to protect him. When the Federal government substituted Ellis Island for Castle Garden, all the safeguards that were thrown about the immigrant by law in the early fifties were abolished because there was no longer anybody to enforce them. We shall never attain a united America so long as we permit the first educational and social contacts of the immigrant to be controlled by his self-interested countrymen, and our equally self-interested Americans, and the exploiter, acting independently, or as the tool of both.
I am unable to find in government or in industrial organization, or in a combination of the two, any such marshaling of facts, any such attention to vital details, any such breadth of view as to make one sanguine of results. The industrial inventory now being made by the Committee on Industrial Preparedness of the Naval Consulting Board is indeed an indication of the possibilities. It is too early to say whether the government will use it or bury the results along with other naval reports.
This is the kind of service in which all good Americans can join, for the guns have been taken out of industrial preparedness. It is not the kind of task prosperous Americans looking for appreciation will like. It is singularly devoid of the pleasures of the footlight and applause; it cannot be done by a committee meeting or sending a check; it is not to be accomplished by “interest” or spasmodic work. It means a full day’s work in the regular task at which each man earns a living, to which is added the overhead charge of Americanism and nationalism. I am convinced that no other service or method will make America again unashamed.