2. Provide government grants, as is done in Australia, Denmark, and some of the South American countries, to which the would-be farmer or home owner can go for financial assistance. In Denmark and Australia any man who shows aptitude and desire for farming and who is able to satisfy a local commission of his abilities, can secure a small farm in a farm colony, fully equipped for planting. The grant includes a house and barn, some cattle and machinery, and sufficient capital to carry the settler over the first season. The applicant must provide a certain portion of the initial outlay himself. He is aided by experts from the colony, he is advised as to what to plant and how to care for his cattle. His produce is marketed co-operatively, while much of the machinery is owned either by the community or by co-operative agencies identified with the community. The land is purchased in large tracts by the State in advance of settlement to prevent speculation, while settlers are required to develop their holdings. They may not purchase for speculative purposes. The State of Denmark has planted thousands of home-owning farmers in this way and has all but ended farm tenancy in a generation’s time. The farm tenant and farm labourer have become owners. A similar policy has been developed in Australia, where millions of dollars have been advanced by the State to settlers. In both of these countries the land settlement colonies have been a great success. There have been few failures and no losses to the State.
3. The savings of the alien should be used for the benefit of the alien. Hundreds of millions of dollars leave this country annually in the form of remittances. Much of it goes abroad because of fear of American banks. Many millions more are in hiding for the same reason. The deposits in the Postal Savings banks are largely the deposits of the immigrant. They are turned over to the National banks and find their way into commercial activities. If these funds were mobilized in co-operative banks, as is done all over Europe, or if the Government would dedicate them to a revolving fund for aiding persons to build homes, to buy farms, and to aid the alien with credit, which he now has no means of securing; he would be lured from the city to the land, he would become a home and farm owner rather than an industrial worker, and would rapidly develop those qualities of mind and character that are associated in our minds with the early Anglo-Saxon settler but which are rather the qualities which spring up of themselves when the economic conditions encourage them.
4. Our deportation laws are a disgrace to any country. They are an adaptation of the fugitive slave laws. The offending alien is subject to lynch law sanctioned by the State. He is arrested on complaint by an inspector. He is then tried by the man who arrests him. His friends and relatives are excluded from the trial. The judge who made the arrest is often the interpreter and the clerk who transcribes the testimony. He also is his jailer. He can and does hold the alien incommunicado. Often the alien scarcely knows why he has been arrested. Often he does not understand the testimony. The local findings have to be approved at Washington by the Department of Labour. But the approval is by a clerk who, like the inspector, often wants to make a record. The opportunity for collusion with police, with crusaders, with employers, with Chambers of Commerce, and with organization bent on “ridding the country of disturbers” is manifest. Often men are arrested, tried, convicted, and possibly placed on ships for their home countries before their families are aware of what has happened to them.
The alien is denied every protection of our constitution. The Bill of Rights does not apply to him. He has no presentment before a Grand Jury, there is no jury trial, he rarely has counsel, and he is often held incommunicado by the official who has taken him into custody and who wants to justify his arrest. The only recourse the alien has is the writ of habeas corpus. But this is of practically no avail. For the courts have held that if there is a scintilla of evidence on which the inspector could act the court will not review the finding. And a scintilla is any evidence at all. When to this is added the fact that the charge “likely to become a public charge” has come to cover almost any condition that might arise, and as this charge is usually added to the others as a recourse on which the inspector may fall back, the chance of relief in the court is practically nil. Under the laws as they now exist the alien is a man without a country. He has no protection from the constitution and little protection under the laws. The alien knows this. He feels that he is defenceless. American liberty to him means the liberty of a policeman, a health or school official, an immigration inspector, and agents of the department of justice to invade his home, to seize his papers, to arrest without warrant, to hold incommunicado, and to deport on a charge that is often as foreign to the facts as anything could be.
It is this more than anything else that has embittered the alien towards America during the last few years. It is this that makes him feel that he is not wanted here. It is this that is sending hundreds of thousands back to Europe, many of them among the best of the aliens and many of them worthy in every way of our confidence and welcome.
A proper immigration policy should be a national policy. Not something for the alien alone but for our own people. For the immigration problem is merely another form of the domestic problem. When we are ready to settle the one we will settle the other. A cross section of one branch of our political State is a cross section of another. The alien of to-day is not very different from the alien of yesterday. He has the same instincts and desires as did those who came in the Mayflower. Only those who came in the Mayflower made their own laws and their own fortunes. Those who come to-day have their laws made for them by the class that employs them and they make their own fortunes only as those aliens who came first permit them to do so.
Frederic C. Howe
RACIAL MINORITIES
“... not to laugh at the actions of men, nor yet to deplore or detest them, but simply to understand them.”—Spinoza.
In America, the race-problem is not only without answer; thus far it is even without formulation. In the face of ordinary economic, political, and religious difficulties, people habitually formulate creeds which give a kind of rhyme and reason to their actions; but where inter-racial relations are concerned, the leaders go pussy-footing all around the fundamental question, while the emotions of the masses translate themselves into action, and action back again into emotion, with less consideration of means and ends than one expects of the maddest bomb-thrower. Everybody has some notion of the millennial aims of the Communist Party, the National Association of Manufacturers, the W.C.T.U., the Holy Rollers; but what are the Southerners getting at, when they educate the Negro, and refuse him the ballot; what ultimate result does the North expect from the granting of the franchise and the denial of social equality? Do both the North and the South hope to maintain a permanent racial division of the country’s population? If so, are the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics to be classed with the Negroes, as unassimilable minorities? How is the conduct of the American majority suited to this aim, if it is an aim? How can permanent division be maintained, except by permanent prejudice? What do the racial liberators, ameliorators, uplifters, and general optimists think about it; or do they think about it at all?