In 1876 the Supreme Court of the United States declared laws enacted by several States to regulate and tax immigration to be unconstitutional, and expressly recommended that Congress should exercise full authority over immigration. This ultimately led to the enactment of the first general immigration law, which was approved by President Chester A. Arthur (1830–86) August 3, 1882. It provided for a head tax of 50 cents on all aliens landed at United States ports, the money thus collected to be used to defray the expenses of regulating immigration and for the care of immigrants after landing. It also provided that foreign convicts, except those convicted for political offences, lunatics, idiots and persons likely to become public charges, should not be permitted to land. Aside from a law forbidding the importation of contract laborers, adopted in 1885 and strengthened by supplementary laws in 1887 and 1888, and aside from the laws about Chinese immigration which do not concern us here, there was no legislation affecting general immigration for nearly a decade, though the question was now widely discussed in the press and there was considerable agitation for further restriction.
In 1888 the House of Representatives authorized, by resolution, the appointment of a select committee to investigate the charges which were made that the immigration laws were being extensively evaded. The committee, known as the “Ford Committee,” in its report more than sustained the charges; it praised the immigrants of the past and deprecated those who were then coming; and proposed a new bill which added polygamists, anarchists and persons afflicted with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease to the excluded classes. Congress, however, did not act upon the recommendations of that committee.
In 1889 a Standing Committee on Immigration in the Senate and a Select Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in the House were established. In 1890 these committees were authorized jointly to make an inquiry relative to immigration. Various reports were submitted, and the conclusion was that a radical change was not advisable, although it had been found that throughout the country there existed a demand for a stricter enforcement of the immigration laws. During 1890 one or more political parties in twenty-three States had demanded additional regulation of immigration. Consequently a law strengthening the existing law in several important details, but making no radical departure from the former policy, was adopted in 1891.
But the question continued to receive the attention of Congress. There was another investigation by a joint committee in 1892, which reported in July of that year, and still another investigation ordered by the Senate. Two new bills were proposed—one establishing additional regulations, the other entirely prohibiting immigration for one year, on account of the epidemic of cholera then prevailing in Europe. But neither this measure, nor the educational test which was then for the first time recommended by a Congressional committee, was adopted, and the revised immigration law, which was approved by President Harrison March 3, 1893, was by no means radical. The head tax on immigrants was raised from fifty cents to one dollar by an amendment to an appropriation act in 1894.
The agitation of the subject in Congress continued, however, and finally both houses adopted a bill for an educational test, excluding persons physically capable and over sixteen years of age who could not read and write the English language or some other language, parents, grandparents, wives and minor children of admissible immigrants being excepted. President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) returned the bill with his veto on March 2, 1897. He objected to the radical departure from the previous national policy relating to immigration, which welcomed all who came, the success of which policy was attested by the last century’s great growth. In referring to the claim that the quality of recent immigration was undesirable, he said: “The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.” In referring to “the best reason that could be given for this radical restriction,” the “protecting of our population against degeneration and saving our national peace and quiet from imported turbulence and disorder,” President Cleveland said that he did not think that the nation would be protected against these evils by limiting immigration to those who could read and write, for, in his mind, it was safer “to admit a hundred thousand immigrants, who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and an opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators who can not only read and write, but delight in arousing by inflammatory speech the illiterate and peacefully inclined to discontent.” Those classes which we ought to exclude, he claimed, should be legislated against directly. Some sections of the bill against aliens who come regularly into the United States from neighboring countries for the purpose of obtaining work, he declared to be “illiberal, narrow and un-American.”
On March 3, 1897, the House passed the bill over the President’s veto by a vote of 193 to 37, but no action was taken in the Senate, and the veto was thus sustained. The same bill was introduced in the following Congress (fifty-fifth) and passed by the Senate, but the House, by a vote of 103 to 101 refused to consider it.
By an act of June 18, 1898, Congress created an Industrial Commission “to investigate questions pertaining to immigration, and to report to Congress and to suggest such legislation as it may deem best upon these subjects.” The final report of this commission was submitted to Congress in February, 1902, and shortly afterwards a bill was introduced in the House which was substantially in accord with the recommendations made. The House added a literary test to this bill, but it was eliminated by the Senate, which raised the head tax from one dollar to two. This was accepted by the House, and the bill, as it was approved by the President March 3, 1903, made no radical change in the existing laws. The same may be said of the present immigration law, which was approved February 20, 1907, which, besides raising the head tax from two to four dollars and somewhat strengthening the provisions against the defective or undesirable classes, made no innovation or departure from the policy of admitting all who may be expected to be able to provide for themselves and to become good citizens. The number as well as the percentage of those excluded is now considerably larger than in former years; but the tide of immigration is not stemmed, and after the quick recovery from the hard times which began with the panic of 1907, there is now again a very large influx of immigrants, among whom the proportion of Jews is by no means smaller than in former years.
The act of 1907 also created an Immigration Commission to “make full inquiry, examination, and investigation, by sub-committee or otherwise, into the subject of immigration.” This commission submitted its report, in forty volumes, in 1910, and recommended some strong restrictions, with the view that “a sufficient number may be debarred to produce a marked effect upon the present supply of unskilled labor.” It also advised that “as far as possible the aliens excluded should be those who come to this country with no intention to become American citizens or even to maintain a permanent residence here; but merely to save enough, by the adoption, if necessary, of low standards of living, to return permanently to their home country.... A majority of the Commission favor the reading and writing test as the most feasible single method of restricting undesirable immigration.” Congress has not acted on these recommendations at the time of this writing (1911).
The question of enforced rest on Sunday is much older than the question of regulating immigration. Several States have Sunday laws which were in their original form enacted in the eighteenth century. In the Carolinas these laws have been but little changed since Colonial times. But the reviews of these laws in the various States and Territories, their effect on the Jews, and the leading cases under them in various times and places, give no adequate idea of their significance for the Orthodox immigrant of the later period. What our best authority on the subject, Albert M. Friedenberg,[50] could collect and collate, contains only a record of such cases which originated in, or were carried up to, higher courts of record. These are usually lawsuits which affected men of means, who could hire attorneys and fight the question as a matter of principle. But these recorded cases give no indication of the tens of thousands of arrests which were made in the large cities, especially in New York City, in the last years, where the cases never went higher than the first instance, because the poor man, if he was not discharged in the Police Court, had to pay his fine or be imprisoned. Appeals to higher courts and insistence upon constitutional or statutory rights are out of the question, not only on account of poverty or ignorance, but also because of familiarity with such procedure in the Old World. The Sunday laws are not constantly enforced in the same manner, there being periods of severity and periods of lenience even under the same local administration, and often a complete change of policy under a new administration, though the statute or State law remains the same. The Jew of Russia or Roumania has been too well accustomed to intermittent police tyranny for the purpose of extortion at home, to be able to interpret the frequent changes in administrative policy or in police regulations here in any other way, and this also tends to discourage appeals to higher courts. The question ought to be investigated not juristically but statistically; the number of arrests made, the loss of time and money sustained by those who are charged with transgressing these laws, and the contrast in the enforcement of them at various periods: if such facts and figures were placed before the American people and before legislators, the attitude of many in regard to Sunday laws would probably be changed. But the figures are not available in a form to be used in a work like the present, and only the hope can be expressed here that they will be collected in the near future by one of the agencies which gather data of that kind relating to Jewish subjects.