American institutions has at last been stayed! After one hundred and fifty-six years the tide of alien immigration has at last been turned and American shores are safe from the peril of the onrushing immigrant! This is the joyous tiding to be gleaned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Security League, and the hundred-percenters, organized and unorganized, from the report just published by Secretary of Labor Doak. ‘During the fiscal year ending June 30, 1932,’ the statement reveals, ‘only 35,576 permanent immigrants were admitted, and 103,295 alien residents left the United States with the expressed intention of making their homes in other countries. In other words, alien emigration exceeded immigration by 67,719.’
“So ends one chapter at least in the story of the making of America, a story which has been written by immigrants whether their place of emigration was England or Russia, Germany or Italy, whether the century of their immigration was the Seventeenth or the Twentieth. It is a chapter which reflects little credit on those who wrote it for it was conceived in fear and executed in bitter and unreasoning hostility to the stranger within our gates. Even before the depression gave the excuse to the alien haters and hunters of an economic justification for their prejudice, concerted action had been attempted to make immigration difficult or impossible to those seking American citizenship and to embitter the lives of those who had managed to enter the country and whose only crime was their desire to become a part of the American people.
“But it is only a chapter that has been concluded. There are depths of sanity and reservoirs of good-will and understanding in the American people which will not permanently be poisoned by the jingoism of the exclusionists. “The open door’ in the older sense of the term may not return, but a decent and just compromise must be achieved between it and the present policy of the Labor Department which so obviously gloats over the fact that America has lost more future citizens than it has gained during the past year.
“In this, as in other questions of national policy, we have witnessed a reaction against the liberal mood and a negation of the progressive spirit. But peoples like men do not live by negatives or reactions. The genius of America is positive. And an essential part of that genius is its traditional welcome to the stranger and its friendship for the alien born.”
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.
