Every state where foreign labor is massed in camps or colonies should require the establishment of schools in those places. Such schools would not only bring their own appropriate benefit, but would serve an equally useful purpose in banishing the evil spirits of mischief and disorder that infest places where the normal social influences are hindered in their free play.
If it be objected that school attendance could not be secured on account of the length of working hours, the obvious answer is that hours of labor which shut out all opportunity for exercise of the mental faculties or the social instincts, are thereby shown to be too long and should be reduced.
Should these two requirements be met, we need no longer be troubled whether immigration is heavy or light. Whether few or many, we should have in our immigrants an intelligent working force who can help develop our country, and for whom we may be grateful and of whom we may be proud.
Protective Work
Miss Frances Kellor was one of the leading American women, outside the settlements, to take hold of the protective work for immigrants. After studying for some time the destinations of immigrants, and organizing workers to do follow-up work among foreign women, she became head of the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Miss Kellor has accomplished many definite results in her work for immigrants, notably their better treatment at the hands of employment agents. She has written much that is pointed on the subject of assimilation and some of the problems involved.
Miss Kellor is also actively directing the work of the North American Civic League for Immigrants which was formed to teach law and order to immigrants, on the one hand, while it also protects them as far as it can from swindlers. This League is an organization of men and women with branches in seaboard cities where women are among the number of special agents who meet steamers and aid immigrants, especially women, in various ways. Mrs. Rudolph Blankenburg of Philadelphia has been greatly interested in the work of the League and she secured the coöperation, for the Philadelphia branch, of women’s aid societies and various civic bodies.
In Providence, Rhode Island, Mrs. E. Haight, the headworker of Sprague House, whose neighbors are largely Italians, has arranged for the North American Civic League for Immigrants to conduct an information bureau and English class, and is also working out a plan for boys’ work there. There are over 40,000 Italians in this colony and no other provision for even a modicum of assimilation of the foreign element into American life.
The New York-New Jersey Committee of the League was organized in 1909 for the purpose of developing permanent city, state, and federal policies regarding conditions created by immigration. Experiments have been tried since then and as soon as a successful policy of meeting conditions has been demonstrated, some private enterprise, or the city, state or federal government, has been urged to pursue the same policy. The necessity of definite systems of protection, education, distribution, and assimilation has been continually urged by the League upon public authorities.
The women of the League have experimented in the field of education, first in Buffalo and later in other cities. In these cities, hundreds of foreign-born housewives have been taught domestic science in their own homes. They have been taken to markets and taught to buy wisely; young members of the family have been reached as well as the mother. Domestic education among the foreign women has thus supplemented the work of the schools in such a way as to secure the coöperation of parents and teachers in the nurture and protection of their children in the new country. In order to avoid the stigma of charity, women promoters of this domestic education have been asking Boards of Education to assume responsibility for the same.
Begun in Buffalo, domestic education has now extended to New York and Rochester; to Mineville, a mining community of 3,000; to Barren Island, New Jersey, an industrial community of 1,400; a canners’ camp at Albion, New York; and an aqueduct labor camp at Valhalla. Three distinct types of cities and four distinct types of isolated communities were thus tried and the results, it is felt, amply justify the expenditure of time and effort.