This agitation, by reason of its obvious causes, may well claim our attention in connection with our present subject.
The effort towards better material conditions which has formed the main impulse of all emigration movements, has, as we learn from history, been always fraught with suffering and misery for the populations first effected, and frequently for several of the succeeding generations, but, in the end, improvement has resulted to the greater number at least. Even when the natural surroundings of a migrated population are not more favorable than those of their previous experience, the mere change of environment has generally furthered an improvement of their social arrangements. The change of their location may disappoint an immigrant people in their hopes of material betterment, but they never fail to take advantage of their new beginnings to eliminate from their new organization such conditions as their previous experience had proved objectionable. Migrations, whether peaceful or otherwise, and for that matter sudden changes of material conditions generally, inevitably consume a large part of the existing powers of those effected, but where those powers are not totally exhausted and destroyed, where enough energy remains to form a nucleus of recuperative force, and especially where the new material surroundings are more favorable than those which were left behind, there a marked improvement of all the conditions of life, physical and intellectual, material and social, becomes developed. It would be superfluous to cite the proofs of this proposition; the history of civilization is a record of its examples, and its latest annals are but statements of this fact.
Palpable as is this fact, and nowhere is it more so than on this Western Continent, and especially in our own country, there are yet many who regard an immigrant with the narrow prejudice of mediæval ignorance, and to whom a stranger is still, as to the barbarians of old, an enemy. Over and over again in the course of the great new departure which the establishment and growth of these United States has made in the world's history, over and over again in the course of our development, has the debarment of immigrants been proposed and advocated. At times the opposition to the new comers has been born of Old World animosities, at other times of religious prejudice, and latterly we hear most frequently of restrictions proposed on political and economic grounds.
That political reasons may justify a restriction, or even dictate the entire debarment of certain defined classes of immigrants, is to be admitted. Thus the exclusion of Chinese immigrants may be defended on the grounds of a broad public policy, with reasons which cannot logically be adduced with regard to any branch of the Caucasian race. The most cogent of these reasons, and the one that has afforded the only rational basis for the policy adopted, is not the economic element of the subject, not that the Chinese live cheaply and work cheaply, but that their assimilation with the rest of the population is practically impossible. To what extent the theoretical possibility of their being merged in the general population could be realized, to what extent its realization would be desirable or the contrary, to what extent a mixture of the Caucasian and Mongolian races would enhance or deteriorate their respective qualities, physical and psychical, we need not here stop to inquire. Suffice it to re-state the fact that political, or perhaps ultimately ethnological reasons may here be considered as prompting a course which could not reasonably be adopted on any other ground. But in the case of immigrants of the Caucasian race, such opposition as has been made from time to time, though frequently insisted upon as a political necessity, can only, in the absence of any broad ethnological basis, be argued on economic grounds.
The discussions engendered by propositions to restrict immigration have recurred at various periods of our history and have been factors in our politics from the beginning of our institutions. There was indeed already in the old Colonial times an anti-immigration or Nativist Party, almost before there were any natives to make it up. In fact, the subject has cropped out whenever some slight occasion offered, and particularly whenever politicians on the in- or the outside needed a new string to harp upon. Some of us are old enough to remember something of the native American agitation which began as far back as 1835, and which took shape in the so-called "American" party, afterwards generally known as the "Know-Nothings," about 1844. In that year the Know-Nothing Party carried the city of New York on a mayoralty election by a large majority, and for a time the movement spread widely throughout the country. It developed strong religious prejudices, and was marked by the memorable anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia. The odium which those disgraceful outrages brought on the "American" party was attempted to be overcome by making it a secret organization, and in the political confusion resulting from the breaking up of the old Whig party, the former grew to such proportions that in 1855 it carried no less than nine state elections. That the movement then had no vital force, but was only a political stalking-horse for partisan purposes, became manifest in the Presidential election of 1856, when the Know Nothing candidates carried only the State of Maryland, and that only by aid of the remnant of the Whig party and the bludgeons of the "Plug-Uglies." The outcome of the whole movement, politically considered, was the complete extinction of the party organization which had fostered, and the permanent discredit of the party leaders who had promoted it.
But the lessons of the past, the arguments and considerations which have repeatedly led to the rejection of a prescriptive policy, have now to be gone over again in this later generation, and the reason for this is plain enough. The economic aspect of the question is more permanent than the political, and the economic argument more plausible than the other. The objectionable features inseparable from a considerable influx of newcomers into a community, large or small, are palpable and on the surface, while the inestimable value of these newcomers, by virtue of the added material and social forces with which they endow the community, becomes perceptible only upon a closer investigation of the subject. It thus happens that when an unusually large number of new arrivals disturbs for a time some existing economic condition, the community is startled by those immediately affected with an outcry against the intruding force, and it is then only on investigation that it becomes apparent that while indeed a comparatively few individuals suffer, and even they but temporarily, the new element is of far-reaching benefit to the community at large.
A quite parallel instance, as far as it goes, is the effect of the introduction of machinery in substitution of hand labor. The history of inventions is burdened with the details of opposition which gathered at every step of the process through which Man has brought to his service the forces of Nature. So too, the practical aid of immigration in subduing the domain of Nature on this Western Continent has often been decried as inimical to the interests of those native to the soil, notwithstanding that even a cursory analysis of the question proves clearly the fact that the immigrant not only does not travail against the native's interest, but on the contrary, aids and enhances that interest beyond all computation. Just as the throng of new inventions temporarily disarranges existent conditions of commerce and of industry, with the immediate result of causing economic distress to some groups of individuals, so the tide of immigration temporarily affects existent conditions in the centers of population, but the eventual benefit of the new force is as certain to be felt in the latter case as in the former.
Let us for a moment consider the character and extent of the impulses which the influx of the newcomers imparts to the social organism. The nature of these impulses is two-fold; the increase of numbers adds power to the community, and the diversity of interests which is an inevitable concomitant of increased population, brings wealth, culture, and all the higher gains of human effort.