TABLE X
Present Political Condition of Foreign-born Male Employees Who Have Been in the United States Five Years or Over, and Who Were Twenty-one Years of Age at Time of Coming, by Race
| “Old” Races | “New” Races | ||
| Race | Per Cent Naturalized and Holding First Papers | Race | Per Cent Naturalized and Holding First Papers |
| Swedish | 92.3 | Hebrew (other than | |
| Swiss | 92.1 | Russian) | 61.6 |
| Welsh | 87.0 | Finnish | 61.2 |
| Danish | 86.8 | Hebrew, Russian | 57.2 |
| German | 85.7 | Austrian (race not | |
| Norwegian | 85.6 | specified) | 53.1 |
| Irish | 82.6 | Armenian | 49.2 |
| English | 80.6 | Italian, North | 45.8 |
| Dutch | 79.9 | Bulgarian | 36.8 |
| Scotch | 79.1 | Slovenian | 35.8 |
| Belgian (race not | Polish | 33.1 | |
| specified) | 76.5 | Lithuanian | 32.5 |
| Bohemian and | Italian, South | 30.1 | |
| Moravian{2} | 76.2 | Russian | 28.0 |
| French | 66.5 | Magyar | 26.8 |
| Canadian (other | Slovak | 22.8 | |
| than French) | 56.7 | Croatian | 22.5 |
| Canadian, French | 31.5 | Rumanian | 21.9 |
| Mexican | 10.0 | Syrian | 20.7 |
| Greek | 20.2 | ||
| Ruthenian | 19.8 | ||
| Spanish | 13.6 | ||
| Serbian | 12.8 | ||
| Cuban | 12.1 | ||
| Portuguese | 5.5 | ||
note 1: Abstracts, vol. i, pp. 485, 486.
note 2: Classed as “Recent” by Immigration Commission.
Prof. Edward A. Ross, who, of all the students of this question, is one of the most uncompromising in generalizing from the reports of the Immigration Commission to the disadvantage of the “newer” races, deduced that “with the change in nationalities came a great change in the civic attitude of the immigrants.”[105] He made little or no allowance for the fact that the “civic attitude” of the “newer” immigrants naturally would not have had time to develop as in the case of those who had been here longer; he made even less for any changes in industrial and social life in this country which might help to account for this alleged change in attitude, by intensifying the hardships of the only kind of employment “newer” immigrants could get, by low wages due to an overstocked labor market, or by the increased herding of foreign born in city slums, which last, of itself, might tend to retard the process of adjustment and assimilation. Prof. John B. Clark saw something of this, when he remarked that “there is far more likeness between different branches of the European family than there is between the economic conditions into which immigrants came in the third quarter of the last century and those into which they come to-day. Then they could have farms for the asking, while now most of them go into mills, mines, shops, and railroad plants, or become employees or tenants on farms owned by others.”[106]
Prof. John R. Commons, discussing the differences in the proportions naturalized among the various racial groups, calls attention to the fact that “it is not so much a difference in willingness as a difference in opportunity.... In course of time these differences will diminish, and the Italian and the Slav will approach the Irishman and the German in their share of American suffrage.”[107]
The war has created an entirely new situation with regard to both immigration and naturalization; it is entirely impossible to forecast the effects, either of the chaotic conditions in Europe or of the reconstruction period in America, upon the influx of foreign born into America, upon the duration of their stay here, or upon the attitude toward citizenship of those already here and entitled to citizenship by length of residence. The wholesale naturalization of immigrants in the national army during the war, regardless of length of residence or any of the other requirements ordinarily so rigidly, so meticulously enforced, has swept into citizenship so large a proportion of human material available and hitherto constituting the bulk of the “naturalization problem” that the old generalizations have become both useless and misleading. It will be long before such immigrants as are now coming, or may come during the next five years, can be the subject of intelligible statistics—especially since nobody is collecting or collating any statistics worthy of the name.