The law of 1790 providing that no one could become a citizen of the United States except free Whites was the law until the aftermath of the Civil War added the word "black" or "of African descent" to those who could be naturalized. This last provision should be repealed and the blacks with the South American and Central American Indians put on the same footing as the Orientals.
All Filipino immigration should be stopped before it becomes a serious menace. If possible, half-breeds from Hawaii should not be allowed entry and absolute restriction should be placed on the entrance of Negroes and Mulattoes from Puerto Rico. There are now swarms of them in the Harlem District of New York. This last is simple justice to the American Negroes.
The increasing use of machines calls for less and less common labor, and even in normal times there will be a surplus of man power for the factories and the farms. Why should outsiders be allowed to come in and take the jobs and lower the living standards of American labor? This is one of the greatest questions before the American people and the depression following 1929 has brought this truth home.
We have now in this country over five million aliens who are not citizens, more than a million of whom are said to be illegally here. These last should be deported as fast as they can be located and funds made available. There can be no better means of relieving unemployment present or future than by such wholesale deportation. We should begin with those aliens who have violated our laws or who have become public charges and all such, now in our penitentiaries and asylums, should be deported forthwith. When that has been done and done fully, it should be followed by the deportation of unemployed aliens.
Registration is necessary for the carrying out of any proper system of deportation. Why any one should object to registration as a proper means of identification is a mystery, unless there is a sinister motive behind the desire to conceal identity.
A storm of protest will arise from the vociferous and influential foreign blocs and from the radicals and half-breeds claiming to be Americans, who will all rush to the defense of their kind. It is strange to find how sensitive we are to any foreign criticism of things American, but how prone we are to listen respectfully to local aliens, who are urging their own interests at the expense of the national welfare.
In order to curb the influence of these aliens and to prevent their pernicious control by politicians, it would also be wise to suspend all naturalization for a generation at least. Our citizenship in the past has been made of little value by the absurd way that it has been thrust upon foreigners. Nothing can be more ill-advised politically than the Americanization programs of some worthy people. An American is not made by conferring upon him the franchise, but by the alien's voluntary and genuine acceptance of our language, laws, institutions, and cultural traditions.
Even though the foregoing program were put into effect, which would, possibly, be a "Counsel of Perfection," we would still have with us an immense mass of Negroes and nearly as many southern and eastern Europeans, intellectually below the standard of the average American. The proper extension to and use by these undesirable classes of a knowledge of birth control may be in the future of substantial benefit, and the practice of sterilization of the criminal and the intellectually unfit, now legally established in twenty-seven States, can be resorted to with good result.
The fundamental question for this nation, as well as for the world at large, is for the community itself to regulate births by depriving the unfit of the opportunity of leaving behind posterity of their own debased type. Our civilization has mercifully put an end to the cruel, wasteful, and indiscriminate destruction of the unfit by Nature, wherefore it is our duty, as exponents of that civilization, to substitute scientific control, that civilization itself may be maintained. Down to date the American stock has only just begun to intermarry with the immigrant stock. When this process has gone further—and it will go further—it will be more difficult to control the destinies of the nation. It is therefore the duty of all Americans, and such of the immigrant stock as are in sympathy with them, to face the problem boldly and to take all eugenic means to encourage the multiplication of desirable types and abate drastically the increase of the unfit and miscegenation by widely diverse races.
So much for our internal problems. The problems outside of our country are a different matter. In the last century the world has grown smaller, and, perhaps, in the long run America must take her part in international affairs.