The Argentine Government welcomes immigration of agricultural colonists and will afford them all facilities for settlement and naturalization, its representative today told the ten-day conference convened by the international Labor Office to promote agricultural immigration to Central and South America. Experts of 15 nations, seven of them “immigration” countries in South America and eight “emigration” countries including Japan, are attending the conference. The Argentine expert emphasized that at the present time his country desired only agriculturists as immigrants.
The Polish delegation urged working out of a plan under international auspices for financing of emigration, with the aid of private organizations, in order to save the countries of emigration from financial strain. Polish experts, including Titus Komarnicki, heading their delegation, denied to the J.T.A. that the Polish Government intended to raise the question of large-scale Jewish emigration since, they said, this conference will deal only with emigration of farm laborers, not of urban elements.
The I.L.O’s report to the conference cited the Jewish Colonization Association’s methods as the best example for any country desirous of settling its citizens in other lands. The association, familiarly known as ICA, was founded by the late Baron de Hirsch in London in 1891 with a $10,000,000 capitalization on and supports colonies for Jews in many parts of the world, particularly South America.
“We can cite the ICA as a permanent institution which has successfully conducted colonization work in the Argentine, and also established several colonies in Brazil,” the report said.
Declaring that the ICA did not make the mistake of introducing philanthropy into its relations with colonists, the I.L.O. said that as soon as mutual rights and obligations were defined and fixed, the ICA’s administrative methods became exclusively commercial. This was held to be the key to its success, because this system strengthened the settlers’ feeling of responsibility, the report said, which could have been shattered under misunderstood philanthropy.
Eight “emigration” and seven “immigration” countries are participating in the conference. The emigration nations are Japan, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and The Netherlands. South American nations are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela.
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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.
