(By our Battle Creek correspondent)
The placing of all nations on a quota basis thus extending the numerical limitation as to the number of immigrants that can come into the United States from any country as a means of bettering the safety of America’s future civilization through immigration, was urged by the Commissioner General of Immigration, Harry E. Hull, in an address before the Third Race Betterment Conference held here.
This action, Mr. Hull said, would reduce the number of immigrants coming into the United States annually from 300,000 to less than 200,000, which is approximately the number intended by Congress when it passed the Act of 1924. “In my opinion,” he stated, “it is all we can safely assimilate under present conditions in the United States.”
Mr. Hull declared that the creation of the border patrol and the detail of immigration technical advisers and United States Public Health Surgeons abroad to aid American consuls in passing upon alien applicants for immigration visas, known believers in anarchistic principles or members of anarchistic societies, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation. This means that we should require a more thorough system of inspection abroad and a more rigid system of examination at our immigration ports.”
The President summed up his recommendations with regard to immigration by saying: “The second object of a proper immigration law ought to be to secure by a careful educational test, some intelligent capacity to appreciate American institutions and act sanely as American citizens.”
It has become more and more apparent to me that the safety of American nationalism or civilization can be served and improved only by strict attention to the annual contribution of immigrants who yearly seek admission from practically every country in the world.
If the World War did nothing more for us it brought clearly to America’s attention the fact that notwithstanding our seeming attention to the regulation of immigration, we had been lax and careless with regard to many foreign groups which had seemed into our civilization. In many instances we found that we had admitted anarchists who at once became a menace to the national safety. Within our very midst we found hostile groups whose allegiance to their native countries gave them a hatred, in the time of war at least, for the very America whose advantage they had eagerly sought.
A cursory examination of our health and moral institutions showed that we were paying the price of negligence in the matter of health advantages and other items of upkeep which might have been avoided by careful methods at ports of emigration. The economic phases had also entered into the situation and we found our native industrial classes competing with masses from abroad whose living standards were inferior to our own, and who, therefore, could work for unscrupulous employers at a low wage.
Along this line and as regards the considerations which should govern us in encouraging the physical and moral betterment of the stock from which we expect to draw our future citizens, I should like you to go over with me certain recommendations of the Immigration Commission, which were published in 1911. They believed that the following ideas should givern in any consideration of the immigration problem:
1. Care should be taken that immigration be such, both in quantity and quality, as not to make too difficult the process of assimilation.
2. Further general legislation concerning the admission of aliens should be based primarily upon economic or business considerations, touching the prosperity and economic well-being of our people.
3. The measure of the national health development of a country is not the extent of its investment in capital, its output or products, or its exports and imports, unless there is a corresponding economic opportunity afforded to the citizen depending upon employment for his moral, mental, and physical development.
4. The development of business may be brought about by means which lower the standard of living of the wage earners. As low expansion of industry which would permit the adaptation and assimilation of the newcoming labor supply is preferable to a very rapid industrial expansion which results in immigration of laborers of low standards and efficiency, who imperil the American standard of wages and conditions of employment.
The Commission agreed that effective effort should be made to insure the entrance into America of a higher type of immigrant from every possible viewpoint.
I think we must all agree in the conclusion that new arrivals must be limited to our capacity to absorb them; in other words, that American institutions must be kept American. It is thus necessary to maintain our policy of restricted immigration, keeping our methods of a selective nature, with intensified inspection at the source and quota restrictions.
Our country has striven through the past centuries to produce a civilization which would stand every test. The hardy American pioneers have been followed, in turn, by leaders in the moderate spheres of American Life. We have long since taken the commercial lead of the world.
Through the principles of democracy we have established a Government which is nearly ideal. Our life scientists tell us that the time is soon to come when by habits and environment of improved degrees our life-span will extend beyond the prophetic three-score and ten.
These goals, though, are absolutely dependent upon the type of citizenship which we produce in the years to come. We must never, measure our civilization by material advance. Efficient business or highly developed inanimate material do not constitute civilization except as the masses of men as benefited thereby. Highly developed civilization of one class of people at the expense of another class has, and always will, fail.
The greatest problem, then, in connection with immigration, is how to preserve our own trend, to advance physically and mentally, and at the same time to absorb the ever-coming mass of immigrants from other countries who desire to share in our citizenship, our civilization, and all the civic ideals we have bult up through centuries of stress and courage.
In his fifteenth annual report to Congress Secretary of Labor Davis said: “We are entitled, it seems to me, in the United States, definitely to select the types as well as the number of aliens to whom we are to give the right of residence and eventually of citizenship.”
Factors over which we had no control have influenced the physical characteristics of those who enter America. It is the same old story of social adjustment, fashioned by environment and opportunity. Even climatic changes are not endured with equal fortitude by migrant classes. This has been true ever since the world began.. The fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the ferae naturae-animals wild by nature-have always been subject to these factors.
Mr. Hull spoke on “The Physical Betterment of Future Citizens through Immigration,” dividing his subject into three parts, the History of United States Immigration Laws; the Administration of the Immigration Laws; and the Physical and Moral Betterment of Future Citizens.”
The possibility that Lessing J. Rosenwald, son of Julius Rosenwald, will be elected to the presidency of Sears. Roebuck & Co., to succeed the late Charles M. Kittle, was discussed in Chicago.
Mr. Rosenwald, who is 36, has been a vice president of Sears-Roebuck for four years and a director of the company since 1917, when he succeeded the late J. F. Skinner. He is general manager of the Sears-Roebuck properties in Philadelphia.
Lessing Rosenwald, because of his knowledge of the business and with many years of activity ahead, will receive serious consideration, it was stated.
Others mentioned are Brig. Gen. R. E. Woods, formerly of Montgomery Ward amp; Co., Otto C. Doering and Max Adler, brother-in-law of Mr. Rosenwald.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
