Summing up the matter of insanity, the Commission speaks as follows: “For the high ratio of insanity among the foreign-born, several causes have been assigned, and while it is difficult to determine the values of the various factors it is probably true that racial traits or tendencies have a more or less important influence. A further cause of mental disease is probably to be found in the total change in climate, occupation, and habits of life which the majority of immigrants experience after arrival in the United States.”

The efficiency of the inspection in regard to feeble-mindedness is shown by the very small proportion of foreign-born of that class appearing in the statistics. This is an affliction which can more easily be detected than the liability to insanity, of which there may be no observable indication at the time of admission.[[306]]

CHAPTER XVI
INDUSTRIAL EFFECTS. CRISES. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION. POLITICAL EFFECTS

It has been observed already that the great argument for immigration during the past half century has been the economic one. The main defense for immigration has rested upon the claim that it has decidedly increased the industrial efficiency of the American people, and has facilitated the development of our resources, and the expansion of industry, at a rate which would not have been possible otherwise. The facts in regard to the age, sex, and physical soundness of the immigrants are mustered to establish them as a peculiarly efficient industrial body.

This contention rests upon two assumptions. First, that our alien residents constitute a net addition to the total population of the country; second, that if there had been no immigration, and the population, particularly that part of it which constitutes the labor supply, had been smaller, that there would have been no inventions and improvements in the way of labor-saving machinery which would have permitted the same amount of work to be accomplished with a smaller amount of labor.

In the light of what has been said in regard to the relation between immigration and the growth of population in Chapter XI, the first of these claims, at the very least, is open to serious question. While the proposition, as has already been stated, is absolutely incapable of mathematical proof, there nevertheless is every reason to believe that our immigrants have not meant a gain in the labor supply, but the substitution of one labor element for another. Not only have the immigrants in general displaced the natives, but the newer immigrants have displaced the older ones in a wide variety of industries and occupations. This latter process has gone on before our very eyes; it is manifest and perfectly comprehensible. A careful consideration of it may make it easier to understand how the same result, in a more subtle way, has been accomplished in the case of the native-born.

The displacement of the English, Irish, Welsh, and German miners in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania by Italians and Slavs is a familiar fact.[[307]] The Italians are being driven out of the boot-blacking business, and other of their characteristic trades, by the Greeks. The Irish laborers on the railroads have been largely supplanted by Italians, Slavs, and Greeks. The “Bravas,” or black Portuguese, have forced the Poles, Italians, and, in large measure, the Finns from the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts.[[308]] Granite City and Madison, Illinois, have witnessed a succession of English, Irish, German, Welsh and Polish, Slovak and Magyar, Roumanian, Greek, and Servian, Bulgarian and Armenian laborers in their industries.[[309]]

In these cases it is plain that while some of the displaced individuals have gone into other, very likely higher, occupations, the real substitution has been the concomitant of a cessation of immigration from the older sources. The north Europeans, being unwilling to meet the competition of races industrially inferior to them, have either ceased emigrating in large numbers, or else are going elsewhere. At any rate they do not come here. The diminution of the supply of native labor has been brought about in an analogous way, though in this case the restrictive forces operate upon the principles of reproduction instead of immigration.

Even though it be granted that the numerical supply of labor has been somewhat increased, there has been an undeniable decrease in the efficiency of the individual laborer, as is attested by the uniformly superior earnings received by the native-born as compared with the foreign-born, or the old immigrant as compared with the new. As Dr. Peter Roberts has pointed out,[[310]] there seems to be a sort of Gresham’s law which operates in the field of labor. The fittest to survive in an unregulated economic competition of races is the one least advanced in culture, the one whose demands in respect to comforts and decencies are lowest, even the one, it sometimes seems, whose industrial productiveness per individual is lowest. It is this fact which gives so dark an aspect to the industrial future of the United States under unregulated immigration.[[311]]

In regard to the second assumption—that a smaller labor supply would not have been offset by an increase in invention—we are again confronted with an impossibility of proof, one way or the other. The economists tell us that one of the great incentives to invention is a scarcity of labor, and also that many of the greatest inventions have been made by men who are working daily with machines, and consequently are in a position to discover improvements that may be made. There is at least some reasonable basis for the belief that if the absence of immigration to this country had resulted in a smaller laboring force, the greater pressure on employers to secure machinery, and the greater intelligence of the machine worker, would together have brought about such a betterment of labor-saving machinery as would have resulted in a total production equal to what we have actually witnessed.