NEW HOMES FOR OLD
I
FINDING THE NEW HOME
The great westward tide of immigration has again begun to rise. Annually to the ports of entry and to the great inland centers of distribution come thousands of immigrant families, strange men and women with young children, unattached girls, and vigorous, simple lads. With few exceptions no provision by native Americans has been made for their reception in their new places of residence. Communities of kindly-intentioned persons, because of their lack of imagination and their indifference, have allowed the old, the young, the mother, and infant to come in by back ways, at any hour of day or night. Frequently they have been received only by uncomprehending or indifferent railroad officials or oversolicitous exploiters.
THE FIRST ADJUSTMENTS
It is not strange that in most American communities there is no habit of community hospitality. Communities are in themselves transitory and fluid. Many of the native born have as yet become only partially adjusted to their physical and social environment. At least the childhood of most of our older generation was spent under the influence of those who had either migrated or immigrated. "Nous marchons tous." We are all "pilgrims and strangers." Some have come sooner, and some have come later, and except for the colored people and those in territory acquired in 1848 and in 1898, all have a common memory of having come deliberately either from something worse or to something better. All have come from where they were into what was a far country.
While the earlier arrivals are making their own adjustments, there are knocking at their gates strangers from a more distant country speaking a foreign tongue, accustomed to totally different ways of living and working. Their reception, however, need not be an impossible task. On their arrival they are formally admitted, and information as to their origin and destination must be supplied. Methods could be devised for receiving them in such a way as to make them feel at ease, and for interpreting to them the changed surroundings in which they must find a home and a job in the shortest possible time.
If discomfort and confusion were the only distress into which the strange group fell, the situation might be only humiliating to our generous and hospitable spirit and could be easily remedied. But the consequences of failure to exercise hospitality at the beginning endure in lack of understanding on the part of both groups. The immigrant fails to find natural and normal ways of sharing in the life of the community, and becomes skeptical as to the sincerity of perfectly well-meaning, but uninformed, professions on the part of the older residents. Spiritual barriers as definite, if not as easily perceived, as the geographical boundaries of the "colonies" formed in the different sections of our cities, develop.