In addition to the foreign-born families who actually need material assistance there are many who, because they are laying aside part of their income either to meet past debts or future needs, are living below the standard prevailing in their community. This family needs to be urged to spend more rather than to save. Unless the agency coming in contact with it digs below the apparent poverty and finds the real income, it will be tempted to give pecuniary aid rather than the personal service the family is in need of. Its service must not result in increased dependency.
Special care in applying this principle of all good case work needs to be exercised in the case of the foreign-born family. Moving from one continent to another, with almost every element in the situation changed, makes the adjustment of the family to normal and healthy standards a delicate and important one. We have been told, for example, by thoughtful members of the Italian group, that in their judgment their fellow-countrymen are often led, through unwise alms-giving, not only to pretend to be poorer than they are, but to live in conditions of squalor detrimental to their well-being.
In fact, in order to understand that normal state from which the family departs when its members become applicants for aid from a case-work agency, the representatives of the agency must have at command facts with reference to the standards and practices prevailing in the particular community from which the family under consideration comes. Only then can the need of the family be estimated with any degree of exactness.
When the facts are learned and the nature and extent of the need are understood, there is the question of resources available for treatment and the question of methods to be used in building and maintaining the family life and in fostering the process of adjustment between its life and that of the community as a whole.
To be able fully to utilize resources, to forecast the effect of certain kinds of care, it is surely desirable for the agency to know the life of the national group into which the family has come, the resources to which the family itself has access, and the ways in which others of the group expect care to be given.
THE LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY
The social case-work agency is faced, then, with several quite different and quite difficult problems in equipment. There is first the question of overcoming the language difficulty. The use of the foreign-speaking trained visitor would probably be regarded as the best way of doing this. The supply is so inadequate that the choice has been generally between a person speaking the language and a person knowing something of methods of case work. And unless the visitor is a fairly competent case worker she would probably better be used as an interpreter and not be given responsibility or allowed to make decisions.
The use of an interpreter gives rise to many difficulties.[73] Because these difficulties are so universal and so important to the full use of the opportunities lying before the case-work agency, an attempt was made to obtain information as to the practice and as to the desires of a number of case workers. Case-work agencies, the district superintendents and visiting housekeepers in the United Charities, the Jewish Aid, the Juvenile Court in Chicago, relief societies in other cities, and the Red Cross chapters throughout the country, were consulted.
Six of the ten districts of the United Charities had foreign-speaking visitors. There were 14 in all—3 Italian, 8 Polish, 2 Bohemian, and 1 Hungarian. Nine of these speak other languages besides their own. All the Jewish Aid Society visitors speak Yiddish. The Funds to Parents' Department of the Juvenile Court has no foreign-born workers, but the Probation Department has 3—Polish, Italian, and Bohemian.
The five Red Cross chapters answering the questionnaire—New York, Brooklyn, Rochester, Buffalo, and Philadelphia—all employ foreign-speaking visitors—11 Italian, 8 Polish, 8 Yiddish, and 2 Russian.