For these reasons, and others, we are driven to the conclusion that future policies of immigration must be based on sound principles of social welfare and social economy, and not upon the economic advantage of certain special industries. Whether we want the brawn of the immigrant must be determined by what it will contribute to the general social surplus, and not by what it adds to A’s railroads or B’s iron mines.

We are told that the three classes of our population demanding unrestricted immigration are large employers of unskilled labor, transportation companies, and revolutionary anarchists. Since this is by definition an economic and not a philosophical question, we may neglect the third class. To the other two classes should be directed certain brief tests of economic good faith. Take at its face value their claim that European brawn by the ship-load is indispensable to American industry. It is becoming an accepted maxim that industry should bear its own charges, should pay its own way. American industry has long fought the contract-labor exclusion feature in current immigration law. Suppose we frankly admit that it is much better for the immigrant to come over here to a definite job than to wander about for weeks after he arrives, a prey to immigrant banks, fake employment agents, and other sharks. Suppose, accordingly, we repeal the laws against contract-labor. Let the employer contract for as many foreign laborers as he likes or says he needs. But make the contractor liable for support and deportation costs if the laborers become public charges. Also require him to assume the cost of unemployment insurance. Exact a bond for the faithful performance of these terms, guaranteed in somewhat the same way that National Banks are safeguarded. Immigration authorities now commonly require a bond from the relatives of admitted aliens who seem likely to become public charges, [pg 53]but who are allowed to enter with the benefit of the doubt. Customs and revenue rules admit dutiable goods in bond. Hence the principle of the bond is perfectly familiar, and its application to contract-immigrants would be in no sense an untried or dangerous experiment. It would establish no new precedent: for precedents, and successful ones, are already established, accepted and approved. It would be understood that all admissions of aliens can be only provisional, with no time limit on deportation. It would be understood further—and the plan would work automatically if the contractor were made such a deeply interested party—that intending immigrants must be rigidly inspected, that they be required to produce consular certificates of clean police record, freedom from chronic disease, insanity, etc.

The result of such a scheme would probably cut away entirely contract-labor; for it would not longer pay. But this does not mean barring the gate to all foreign labor. As an aid to the employer and to our own native workingman, we must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better, establish a chain of labor bureaus throughout the Union. The system must be placed under Federal direction, largely because the Department of Labor would be charged, ex officio, with ascertaining the “true demand” for immigrant labor, and it could only accomplish this end effectively through such an employment clearing system. This true demand would, of course, be based not only upon mere numerical excess of calls for labor over demands for jobs, but would also take into account the nature of the work, working conditions, and above all the prevailing level of wages. According to this true demand the Department would adjust a sliding scale of admissions of immigrant laborers.

Much might be said in favor of an absolute embargo upon all immigration until such a body as the Industrial Relations Commission has time to make an authoritative economic survey of the whole country, or until the Unemployment [pg 54]Research Commission recently called for by Miss Kellor could make the three years’ study contemplated by her as the only way out of the unemployment morass. Twenty years ago men of the type of General Walker frankly urged that the immigration gates be closed for a flat period of ten years or so. But the sliding scale plan contemplates no such radical step. Indeed it is radical in no sense whatever. The proposed immigration act now before Congress (The Burnett Bill, H.R. 6060) paves the way for it, and provides a working principle, which apparently is accepted on all sides. Section 3 includes this clause: “That skilled labor, if otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed can not be found in this country, and the question of the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular instance may be determined by the Secretary of Labor….” A really workable test for immigration, superior by far to the literacy test or any other so far suggested, might easily be developed by simply enlarging the scope of this clause, making it include unskilled as well as skilled labor. No machinery other than that contemplated by the present act would be required.

The immigration problem can never be satisfactorily handled until we fix upon some such means of determining just what the economic need is. There is no danger of hindering legitimate industrial expansion in times of sudden business prosperity: for the transportation companies may be safely trusted to supply in three or four weeks aliens enough to fill all the gaps in the industrial army. Neither would injustice be done to the immigrant himself. On the contrary, he would be assured of a job and respectful consideration when he arrived. The “dago” or the “bohunk” would acquire a new dignity and a more enviable status than he now occupies. The selective process thus involved would much improve the quality of the immigrant admitted, and would incidentally render assimilation of the foreigner all the easier.

[pg 55]The precise details of selection, and the machinery, are mere matters of detail. But the consular service, as long ago suggested by Catlin, Schuyler and others, seems to offer the proper base of operations. We have already recommended charging consuls with viséing certificates from police, medical, and poor-relief authorities. We should further require that declarations of intention to migrate be published (somewhat as marriage banns are published) at local administrative centers (arrondissement, Bezirk, etc.) and at United States consular offices; the consular declaration should be obligatory; perhaps the other might be optional, though in all probability foreign governments would coöperate in demanding it. These validated declarations of intention should be filed in the consular offices. When notice comes from the United States Department of Labor that so many laborers will be admitted from such and such district, the declarations are to be taken up in the order of their filing, and the proper number of persons certified for admission. The apportionment of admissions from each country might be calculated on a basis of its population, also upon the nature of the employment offered, and upon the desirability of the alien himself, his general assimilability, his willingness to become naturalized, to adopt the English language and the American standard of living among efficient workers, etc.,—all as proved by past experience with his countrymen. This plan, in so far as it provides for a sliding scale of admissions, is in line with that proposed by Professor Gulick. He advocates making all nations eligible for admission and citizenship, but would admit them only in proportion as they can be readily assimilated. This would admit annually, say, five per cent of those already naturalized, with their American children. The principle here seems to be that we can assimilate from any land in, and only in, proportion to the number already assimilated from that land. But the difficulty of applying such a test lies in the complexity of the assimilative [pg 56]process. No measure yet exists for assimilation. Anthropologists are convinced that various strains in the populations, for example of France, or Great Britain, which have been dwelling together for centuries, are not by any means assimilated. Mere naturalization is not a sufficient test of assimilation; it is only the expression of a desire to be assimilated; and it may only be a device for the promotion of business success here or in foreign parts, as we have already indicated in the case of the Greeks. Hence in working out the basis of a sound immigration policy, it would seem more practicable to consider first the question of economic utilization rather than assimilation. This, of course, does not exclude from the Secretary of Labor’s judgment the category of assimilability as one of the factors in determining the apportionment of admissions.

It will appear that the plan outlined above limits immigration policy to purely national and economic considerations. But it is, as matters now stand, a national question. And it must remain so for some time to come, even if we are reproached with a narrow Mercantilist economics. The admission of aliens is not yet a fundamental international right, or duty; it is only an example of comity within the family of nations. And the matter must rest in this state of limbo until we develop some institution or method of registering our sentiments of internationalism, and especially of determining international surplus. As it is idle to talk or dream of abolishing poverty until at least the concept of social or national surplus is pretty clearly fixed and its realization either actually at hand or fairly imminent, just so is it vain to expect an international adjustment of the immigration problem on economic grounds until the existence of an international surplus is demonstrated, and the methods of apportioning it worked out.

How soon we may expect these things it is not our province to predict. It is too early to pass final judgment [pg 57]on Professor Patten’s dictum that inter-racial coöperation is impossible without integration, and that races must therefore stand in hostile relations or finally unite. But it is perfectly apparent that we have a long way to travel before the path to integration is cleared. Such assemblages as the First Universal Races Congress which met in London in 1911 can do much to prepare the way. But it must not be forgotten that the German representative at that Congress pleaded for the maintenance of strict racial and national boundaries, and summed up his plea in the rather ominous sentence: “The brotherhood of man is a good thing, but the struggle for life is a far better one.” Meanwhile we need not anticipate serious international difficulties in the way of the sliding-scale plan; for foreign governments are watching the tide of immigration with mixed feelings. They welcome the two or three hundred million dollars sent home annually by alien residents in the United States. But they also resent the dislocations of industry, the fallow fields, the dodging of military service, and the disturbance of the level of prices which such wholesale emigrations inflict upon the mother country.

Since the protagonists of unrestricted immigration have taken largely an economic line of argument, it seemed desirable to accept their terms, and meet them on their own ground. But I should not wish to be misunderstood as limiting the immigration question to its economic phases. When we have said that the latifondisti of Southern Italy are in despair at the scarcity of laborers to work their lands at starvation wages, and that the railway builders and mine operators of America are equally anxious to have those selfsame South Italian laborers for their own exploitive enterprises, we have told a bare half of the tale. There remain all those cultural, educational, political, religious and domestic variations and adjustments which make up the general problem of assimilability of the alien and of the strength of our own national digestion. America had a giant’s undiscriminating appetite [pg 58]in the great days of expansion from 1850 to 1890. But there are many signs, economic and other, that we can no longer play Gargantua and continue a healthy nation. An unwise engineer sometimes over-stokes his boilers, and courts disaster. Is it not equally possible that national welfare may suffer from an over-dose of human fuel in our industry?