The immigrant community manifestly exists to enable the immigrant to live. By life, however, we mean something more than mere physical existence. Man is a creature such that when he lives at all he lives in society, lives in his hopes, in his dreams, and in the minds of other men. In some way or another, man is bound to realize all his fundamental wishes, and these wishes, according to Dr. W. I. Thomas, are four:
He must have (1) security, that is, a home; some place to go out from and return to.
He must have (2) new experience, recreation, adventure, new sensations.
He must have (3) recognition, i.e., he must belong to some society in which he has status, some group in which he is somebody; somewhere or other, in short, he must be a person, rather than a mere cog in the economic or social machine.
Finally (4) he must have affection, intimate association with someone or something, even though it be merely a cat or a dog, for which he feels affection and knows that affection is returned. All special human wishes reduce finally to these four categories, and no human creature is likely to be wholesome and happy unless, in some form or manner, all four of these wishes are more or less adequately realized.[[62]]
While I was on the Pacific Coast a few months ago, studying what we have called “race relations,” I was impressed by the marked differences, as between immigrant groups, with respect to their ability to accommodate themselves to the American environment and, within the limitations imposed upon them by our customs and our laws, to provide for all the interests of life.
Immigrant communities are likely to include within the circle of their interests and their organizations all the interests of life. Every immigrant community will have a religious organization—a synagogue, a temple, or a church—with its related, often dependent, mutual aid and welfare organizations. It will have also its own business enterprises, its clubs, lodges, coffee houses, restaurants and gathering places, and a press. Every immigrant community is likely to have its press in America even if it did not have one in the home country. The immigrant colony is frequently nothing more than a transplanted village, for America actually has been colonized not by races or by nationalities, but by villages.
As to the competence of these immigrant communities to provide an environment in which immigrants can live, Raymond Pearl’s paper, “The Racial Origin of Almshouse Paupers in the United States,” published in Science (October 31, 1924), throws some light.
One paragraph in that paper states the situation as between the nation and the foreign-born. It says:
While on January 1, 1923, there were in almshouses 59.8 native-born white persons per 100,000 of the same class in the population, the corresponding figure for the foreign-born was 173.6. This is by some regarded as a fact of dread significance. Perhaps it is. To me it seems possibly only an interesting expression of the difficulties which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new environment.