Mary Antin, too, has helped Americans to see the immigration problem as a “vivid human experience.” She says of the Jewish girl: “Such girls as these know Socialism as the only savior in their distress, since their only reading has been literature of a Socialistic nature. They do not realize that although Socialism is one of the agencies for working out our national problem, it is being supplemented by the aid and interest of many societies like the Consumers’ League, which are trying to emphasize the fact that liberty means liberty for all; not liberty to exist, but to live, to enjoy, to develop.”[[30]]
Interesting studies have been made by women of the various nationalities that come to our shores in an effort to interpret them to our people. “Our Slavic Fellow Citizens” by Emily Green Balch and “Little Citizens” by Myra Kelly are among the most successful of them. In addition to these descriptive studies, Anna A. Plass and others have prepared textbooks for the foreigners to help them, in turn, interpret Americans. “Civics for Americans in the Making” by Miss Plass is an attempt to teach English with citizenship.
A Literacy Test
Kate Holladay Claghorn, of the New York School of Philanthropy, who has given special study to the problem, believes that one of the first aids to the proper assimilation of the alien would be a literacy test designed to exclude many non-assimilable elements. Her reasons are thus set forth in an article in The Survey:
Any substantial advance in the solution of the immigration problem must be looked for through legislation, since private activity, no matter how devoted or extended it is, can be expected to make but little impression upon a social group constantly augmented at the rate of from half a million to a million a year.
What new legislation is most needed? From the federal government the establishment of a literacy test, not for the purpose of restricting immigration but for the protection of the immigrant. The true value of a literacy test to secure protection has been observed by making use of it as a subterfuge to bring about restriction. But it should really be regarded as perhaps the best wholesale measure of protection that could be devised.
It has been abundantly shown that the bulk of the immigrant’s own burden and our burden because of him are due not to viciousness or abnormality of any sort, but to sheer helplessness. He is exploitable raw material, and he is exploited, and held, until he can push out of it, at a low grade of living detrimental to him and to the community. And the one effective measure to help the helpless is to bring them to a condition in which they can protect themselves.
The immigrant who has learned to read and write has gained control of the tool that brings him out of the stone age, with all its associated habits, into the age of bronze, where we live and work today. This may be only his own native language—as required by the bill which was vetoed last year—but through it he is at least brought into an immensely wider circle of communication than is afforded by word of mouth only, so that he need not be at the mercy of the nearest rascal who wants to take advantage of his ignorance. Having this, he is helped a long stage on the way of acquiring the use of the more effective tool—reading and writing the English language, which would be our next demand for him. For this we should ask state legislation, establishing compulsory education for non-English speaking adults (immigrant or otherwise).
The expense of such an undertaking should not be urged against it, for expense should be measured in relation to return, and, measured in this way, this particular expense would be found a profitable investment, as every citizen properly prepared for citizenship is an asset to the state. The original purpose of public education in this country was to perform this very task.
Does not the adult immigrant need this preparation much more than the native-born child, whose traditions, home surroundings and social advantages can supply many deficiencies in formal education?