Continuing its editorial campaign for lowering of immigration bars to refugees, the New York Daily News, the newspaper with the largest circulation in America, today urged the admission of 13,000,000 people as a means of returning to the “optimistic, expanding prosperity” of pre-quota days. Increasing the country’s population 10 per cent, the full-column editorial asserted, “would give the farmers 13,000,000 more mouths to feed and backs to cover and 26,000,000 more feet to shoe,” thus providing farmers “a home market and reasonably good prices” and ending the necessity for crop control.
In a later editorial, the News said, there will be discussed “such questions as what these people would do for money when they got here, whether they would displace 13,000,000 Americans already working for wages, and so on.” Today’s editorial was captioned “Can We Bring Our Foreign Markets Here” and carried with it a photo of Immigration Commissioner James l. Houghteling, captioned: “We wish he had more work to do.”
“We think the immigration policy of the United States needs to be reexamined from the point of view of our national producing power as related to our national consuming power,” the News declared. “We don’t think it is sensible to dismiss this suggestion, as some people try to do, by simply calling such talk unsound.”
Pointing to agricultural overproduction and loss of foreign markets as indicating that “farmers will be able to buy less and less manufactured goods made by city workers — which in due course will increase city unemployment,” the paper suggests: “Being unable to sell as much to the foreigners as we used to, might it not be a good plan to bring some of the foreigners over here?”
“Suppose we should add ten per cent to our population — that would be roughly 13,000,000 people — by radically lowering the immigration here,” the editorial declares. “This would give the farmers 13,000,000 more mouths to feed and backs to cover, and 26,000,000 more feet to shoe. Assuming the 13,000,000 newcomers could somehow get the money to buy these essentials, the farmers would profit.
“There would be an end, too, to any necessity for crop control, at least for a considerable time to come. The farmers could produce all the food and meat the weather would permit, and there would be a market for it — a home market at reasonably good prices. In their turn, the farmers could buy more automobiles, watches, farm machinery, electrical appliances and so on from the city factories — which in their turn would be forced to hire more people and buy more raw materials.
“Thus we ought to adjust our economy to the supply-and-demand law with natural, human consumption of supplies, instead of with artificial crop controls. And we ought to again to the same sort of optimistic, expanding prosperity we enjoyed most of the time before we clamped down the gates against the eager and natural flow of humanity from overcrowded Europe into the partial American vacuum.”
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.
