Now, since the various human stocks differ widely in genetic worth, nothing should be more carefully studied than the relative values of the different strains in a population, and nothing should be more rigidly scrutinized than new strains seeking to add themselves to a population, because such new strains may hold simply incalculable potentialities for good or for evil. The potential reproductive powers of any stock are almost unlimited. Therefore the introduction of even a small group of prolific and adaptable but racially undesirable aliens may result in their subsequent prodigious multiplication, thereby either replacing better native stocks or degrading these by the injection of inferior blood.
The admission of aliens should, indeed, be regarded just as solemnly as the begetting of children, for the racial effect is essentially the same. There is no more damning indictment of our lopsided, materialistic civilization than the way in which, throughout the nineteenth century, immigration was almost universally regarded, not from the racial, but from the material point of view, the immigrant being viewed not as a creator of race-values but as a mere vocal tool for the production of material wealth.
Immigration is thus, from the racial standpoint, a form of procreation, and like the more immediate form of procreation it may be either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse. Human history is largely the story of migrations, making now for good and now for ill. Migration peopled Europe with superior white stocks displacing ape-like aborigines, and settled North America with Nordics instead of nomad redskins. But migration also bastardized the Roman world with Levantine mongrels, drowned the West Indies under a black tide, and is filling our own land with the sweepings of the European east and south.
Migration, like other natural movements, is of itself a blind force. It is man’s divine privilege as well as duty, having been vouchsafed knowledge of the laws of life, to direct these blind forces, rejecting the bad and selecting the good for the evolution of higher and nobler destinies.
Colored immigration is merely the most extreme phase of a phenomenon which has already moulded prodigiously the development of the white world. In fact, before discussing the specific problems of colored immigration, it would be well to survey the effects of the immigration of various white stocks. When we have grasped the momentous changes wrought by the introduction of even relatively near-related and hence relatively assimilable strains, we will be better able to realize the far more momentous consequences which the introduction of colored stocks into white lands would entail.
The racial effects of immigration are ably summarized by that lifelong student of immigration problems, Prescott F. Hall. These effects are, he truly remarks, “more far-reaching and potent than all others. The government, the state, society, industry, the political party, social and political ideals, all are concepts and conventions created by individual men; and when individuals change these change with them. Recent discoveries in biology show that in the long run heredity is far more important than environment or education; for though the latter can develop, it cannot create. They also show what can be done in a few years in altering species, and in producing new ones with qualities hitherto unknown, or unknown in combination.”[148]
The ways in which admixture of alien blood can modify or even destroy the very soul of a people have been fully analyzed both by biologists and by social psychologists like Doctor Gustave Le Bon.[149] The way in which wholesale immigration, even though mainly white, has already profoundly modified American national character is succinctly stated by Mr. Eliot Norton. “If,” he writes, “one considers the American people from, say, 1775 to 1860, it is clear that a well-defined national character was in process of formation. What variations there were, were all of the same type, and these variations would have slowly grown less and less marked. It needs little study to see of what great value to any body of men, women, and children a national or racial type is. It furnishes a standard of conduct by which any one can set his course. The world is a difficult place in which to live, and to establish moral standards has been one of the chief occupations of mankind. Without such standards, man feels as a mariner without a compass. Religions, rules, laws, and customs are only the national character in the form of standards of conduct. Now national character can be formed only in a population which is stable. The repeated introduction into a body of men of other men of different type or types cannot but tend to prevent its formation. Thus the 19,000,000 of immigrants that have landed have tended to break up the type which was forming, and to make the formation of any other type difficult. Every million more will only intensify this result, and the absence of a national character is a loss to every man, woman, and child. It will show itself in our religions, rules of conduct, in our laws, in our customs.”[150]
The vital necessity of restriction and selection in immigration to conserve and build race-values is thus set forth by Mr. Hall:
“There is one aspect of immigration restriction in the various countries which does not often receive much attention; namely, the possibility of its use as a method of world-eugenics. Most persons think of migration in terms of space—as the moving of a certain number of people from one part of the earth’s surface to another. Whereas the much more important aspect of it is that of a functioning in time.
“This comes from two facts. The first is that the vacuum left in any country by emigration is rapidly filled up through a rise in the birth-rate.... The second fact is that immigration to any country of a given stratum of population tends to sterilize all strata of higher social and economic levels already in that country. So true is this that nearly all students of the matter are agreed that the United States would have a larger population to-day if there had been no immigration since 1820, and, it is needless to add, a much more homogeneous population. As long as the people of any community are relatively homogeneous, what differences of wealth and social position there may be do not affect the birth-rate, or do so only after a considerable time. But put into that community a number of immigrants, inferior mentally, socially, and economically, and the natives are unwilling to have their children associate with them in work or social life. They then limit the number of their children in order to give them the capital or education to enter occupations in which they will not be brought into contact with the new arrivals. This result is quite apparent in New England, where successive waves of immigration from lower and lower levels have been coming in for eighty years. In the West, the same New England stock has a much higher birth-rate, showing that its fertility is in no way diminished. In the South, where until very recently there was no immigration at all, and the only socially inferior race was clearly separated by the accident of color, the birth-rate has remained very high, and the very large families of the colonial period are even now not uncommon.