Possibly the most significant fact revealed in the course of the study has been the extent to which foreign-born groups have been inaugurating and developing educational and social movements, and establishing institutions and agencies, quite independent of the Federal, state, or local agencies at work along the same general lines. On the other hand, the national educational and welfare movements carried on by the "American people" have ignored the organization and leadership in the foreign-born community. This has been the case to an amazing extent, even when the public efforts have been ostensibly based upon studies of conditions existing in cities with a population that is largely of foreign birth.
When no channels of communication between the immigrant and the larger community seem to have been established, we have been concerned to inquire how such channels can be most effectively created. The barriers that through ignorance, indifference, and misunderstanding on either side have been allowed to grow up must be broken down. We have tried to follow up such avenues of communication as have opened naturally before us, after becoming acquainted with some of the leaders in the different groups.
The organizations with which we have become somewhat acquainted are representative of the types found in all the main Slavic groups and among the Lithuanians, Hungarians, Rumanians, and Greeks. Suggestions applicable to them indicate a basis of co-operation with a very large proportion of our foreign-born population.
A list of the principal racial organizations in the United States is included in the Appendix. Information about local branches of these organizations can usually be secured by correspondence.
LOCAL BENEFIT SOCIETIES
The first incentive to organization among all the groups seems to have been the precarious economic situation during the years of effort to get a foothold here. The first association of the newly arrived immigrant is one of mutual aid. "Benefit" will be found as the basis of the important foreign-born organizations, no matter what new purposes may have been taken on with the establishment and progress of the group as a whole.
WHO WILL WELCOME THEM?
In the interviews we have had with the leaders among the groups the point has been repeatedly emphasized that Americans can never appreciate the situation of immigrants during their first ten years in this country. The strangeness, the poverty, the pressure to send money home, the inadequate, irregular income, the restriction to the low-skilled job—"there is in America, at first, nothing for an immigrant but the shovel"—the lack of knowledge of money values and ignorance of American domestic and social practices—these conditions drive the immigrants into co-operative effort. The appeal sent out by a Russian national society organized in 1912 begins with some such words as these:
While we are in this country we are doing the lowest kind of work, and many accidents happen to us; if we do not belong to an organization we are without help.... The purpose of our brotherhood is to help our brethren in a strange country.