They Who Knock at Our Gates — Judges in the Gate, part 4

A whole group of phenomena due to social and economic causes have been falsely traced, in this country, to the quantity and quality of immigration.

Among these are the labor troubles, such as non-employment, strikes, riots, etc. England has no such immigration as the United States, and yet Englishmen suffer from non-employment, from riots and bitter strikes.

Whom does the English workingman blame for his misery?

Let the American workingman quarrel with the same enemy.

If wage-cutting is a sin more justly laid at the door of the immigrant, a minimum wage law might put a stop to that.

The immigrant undoubtedly contributes to the congestion of population in the cities, but not as a chief cause.

Congestion is characteristic of city life the world over, and the remedy will be found in improved conditions of country life.

Moreover, the immigrant has shown himself responsive to direction away from the city when a systematic attempt is made to help him find his place in the country.

There is the experience of the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch Foundation as a hint of what the Government might accomplish if it took a hand in the intelligent distribution of immigration.

The records of this organization, dealing with a group of immigrants supposed to be especially addicted to city life, kill two immigrant myths at one stroke.

They prove that it is possible to direct the stream of immigration in desired channels and that the Jew is not altogether averse to contact with the soil; both facts contrary to popular notions.

A good deal of anti-immigration feeling has been based on the vile conditions observed in labor camps, by another turn of that logic which puts the blame on the victims.

A labor camp at its worst is not an argument against immigration, but an indictment of the brutality of the contractor who cares only to force a maximum of work out of the workmen, and cares nothing for their lives; an indictment also of the Government that allows such shameful exploitation of the laborers to go on.

That a labor camp does not have to be a plague spot has been gloriously demonstrated by Goethals at Panama.

What Goethals did was to emphasize the _man_ in workingman, with the result that Panama during the vast operations of digging the Canal was a healthier, happier, more inspiring place to live in than many of our proudest cities; the workmen came away from the job better men and better citizens; and the work was better done and with more dispatch and at less expense than any such work was ever done by the old-fashioned method, where the workers are treated not as men but as tools.

There may not be another Goethals in the country, but what a great man devises little men may copy.

The labor camp must never again be mentioned as a reproach to the immigrant who suffers degradation in it, or the world will think that we do not know the meaning of the medals which we ourselves have hung on Goethals's breast.

Immigrants are accused of civic indifference if they do not become naturalized, but when we look into the conditions affecting naturalization we wonder at the numbers who do become citizens.

Facilities for civic education of the adult are very scant, and dependent mostly on the fluctuating enthusiasm of private philanthropies.

The administration of the naturalization laws differs from State to State and is accompanied by serious material hindrances;

while the community is so indifferent to the civic progress of its alien members that it is possible for a foreigner to live in this country for _sixteen years_, coming in contact with all classes of Americans, without getting the bare information that he may become a citizen of the United States if he wants to.

Such a case, as reported by a charity worker of New Britain, Connecticut, makes a sensitive American choke with mortification.

If we were ourselves as patriotic as we expect the immigrant to be, we would employ Salvation Army methods to draw the foreigner into the civic fold.

Instead of that, we leave his citizenship to chance--or to the most corrupt political agencies.

I would rather not review the blackest of all charges against the immigrant, that he has a baleful effect on municipal politics: I am so ashamed of the implications.

But sensible citizens will talk and talk about the immigrant selling his vote, and not know whom they are accusing.

Votes cannot be sold unless there is a market for them.

Who creates the market for votes?

The ward politician, behind whom stands the party boss, alert, and powerful; and behind him--the indifferent electorate who allow him to flourish.

Among immigrants of the "new" order, the wholesale prostitution of the ballot is confined to those groups which are largely subjected to the industrial slavery of mining and manufacturing communities and construction camps.

These helpless creatures, in their very act of sinning, bear twofold witness against us who accuse them.

The foreman who disposes of their solid vote acquires his power under an economic system which delivers them up, body and soul, to the man who pays them wages, and turns it to account under a political system which makes the legislature subservient to the stock exchange.

But let it be definitely noted that to admit that groups of immigrants under economic control fall an easy prey to political corruptionists is very far from proving any inherent viciousness in the immigrants themselves.

Neither does the immigrant's civic reputation depend entirely on negative evidence.

New York City has the largest foreign population in the United States, and precisely in that city the politicians have learned that they cannot count on the foreign vote, because it is not for sale.

A student of New York politics speaks of the "uncontrollable and unapproachable vote of the Ghetto."

Repeated analyses of the election returns of the Eighth District, which has the largest foreign population of all, show that "politically it is one of the most uncertain sections" in the city.

Many generations of campaign managers have discovered to their sorrow that the usual party blandishments are wasted on the East Side masses.

Hester Street follows leaders and causes rather than party emblems.

Nowhere is the art of splitting a ticket better understood.

The only time you can predict the East Side vote is when there is a sharp alignment of the better citizens against the boss-ridden.

Then you will find the naturalized citizens in the same camp with men like Jacob Riis and women like Lillian Wald.

And the experience of New York is duplicated in Chicago and in Philadelphia and in every center of immigration.

Ask the reformers.

How often we demand more civic virtue of the stranger than we ourselves possess!

A little more time spent in weeding our own garden will relieve us of the necessity of counting the tin cans in the immigrant's back yard.

As to tin cans, the immigrants are not the only ones who scatter them broadcast.

How can we talk about the foreigners defacing public property, when our own bill-boards disfigure every open space that God tries to make beautiful for us?

It is true that the East Side crowds litter the parks with papers and fruit-skins and peanut shells, but they would not be able to do so if the park regulations were persistently enforced.

And in the mean time the East Side children, in their pageants and dance festivals, make the most beautiful use of the parks that a poet could desire.

There exists a society in the United States the object of which is to protect the natural beauties and historical landmarks of our country.

Who are the marauders who have called such a society into being?

Who is it that threatens to demolish the Palisades and drain off Niagara?

Who are the vulgar folk who scrawl their initials on trees and monuments, who chip off bits from historic tombstones, who profane the holy echoes of the mountains by calling foolish phrases through a megaphone?

The officers of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society are not watching Ellis Island.

On the contrary, it was the son of an immigrant whose expert testimony, given before a legislative committee at Albany, helped the Society to save the Falls of the Genesee from devastation by a power company.

This same immigrant's son, on another occasion, spent two mortal hours tearing off visiting-cards from a poet's grave--cards bearing the names of American vacationists.

Some of the things we say against the immigrants sound very strange from American lips.

We speak of the corruption of our children's manners through contact with immigrant children in the public schools, when all the world is scolding us for our children's rude deportment.

Finer manners are grown on a tiny farm in Italy than in the roaring subways of New York; and contrast our lunch-counter manners with the table-manners of the Polish ghetto, where bread must not be touched with unwashed hands, where a pause for prayer begins and ends each meal, and on festival occasions parents and children join in folk-songs between courses!

If there is a corruption of manners, it may be that it works in the opposite direction from what we suppose.

At any rate, we ourselves admit that the children of foreigners, before they are Americanized, have a greater respect than our children for the Fifth Commandment.

We say that immigrants nowadays come only to exploit our country, because some of them go back after a few years, taking their savings with them.

The real exploiters of our country's wealth are not the foreign laborers, but the capitalists who pay them wages.

The laborer who returns home with his savings leaves us an equivalent in the products of labor; a day's service rendered for every day's wages.

The capitalists take away our forests and water-courses and mineral treasures and give us watered stock in return.

Of the class of aliens who do not come to make their homes here, but only to earn a few hundred dollars to invest in a farm or a cottage in their native village, a greater number than we imagine are brought over by industrial agents in violation of the contract labor law.

Put an end to the stimulation of immigration, and we shall see very few of the class who do not come to stay.

And even as it is, not all of those who return to Europe do so in order to spend their American fortune.

Some go back to recover from ruin encountered at the hands of American land swindlers.

Some go back to be buried beside their fathers, having lost their health in unsanitary American factories.

And some are helped aboard on crutches, having lost a limb in a mine explosion that could have been prevented.

When we watch the procession of cripples hobbling back to their native villages, it looks more as if America is exploiting Europe.

O that the American people would learn where their enemies lurk!

Not the immigrant is ruining our country, but the venal politicians who try to make the immigrant the scapegoat for all the sins of untrammeled capitalism--these and their masters.

Find me the agent who obstructs the movement for the abolition of child labor, and I will show you who it is that condemns able-bodied men to eat their hearts out in idleness;

who brutalizes our mothers and tortures tender babies; who fills the morgues with the emaciated bodies of young girls, and the infirmaries with little white cots; who fastens the shame of illiteracy on our enlightened land, and causes American boys to grow up too ignorant to mark a ballot; who sucks the blood of the nation, fattens on its brains, and throws its heart to the wolves of the money market.

The stench of the slums is nothing to the stench of the child-labor iniquity.

If the foreigners are taking the bread out of the mouth of the American workingman, it is by the maimed fingers of their fainting little ones.

And if we want to know whether the immigrant parents are the promoters or the victims of the child labor system, we turn to the cotton mills, where forty thousand native American children between seven and sixteen years of age toil between ten and twelve hours a day, while the fathers rot in the degradation of idleness.

From all this does it follow that we should let down the bars and dispense with the guard at Ellis Island?

Only in so far as the policy of restriction is based on the theory that the present immigration is derived from the scum of humanity.

But the immigrants may be desirable and immigration undesirable.

We sometimes have to deny ourselves to the most congenial friends who knock at our door.

At this point, however, we are not trying to answer the question whether immigration is good for us.

We are concerned only with the reputation of the immigrant--and incidentally with the reputation of those who have sought to degrade him in our eyes.

If statecraft bids us lock the gate, and our national code of ethics ratifies the order, lock it we must, but we need not call names through the keyhole.

Mount guard in the name of the Republic if the health of the Republic requires it, but let no such order be issued until her statesmen and philosophers and patriots have consulted together.

Above all, let the voice of prejudice be stilled, let not self-interest chew the cud of envy in full sight of the nation, and let no syllable of willful defamation mar the oracles of state.

For those who are excluded when our bars are down are exiles from Egypt, whose feet stumble in the desert of political and social slavery, whose hearts hunger for the bread of freedom.

The ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship, and Ellis Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.

III