Various Aspects of Migration Problem Presented to World Congress

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

Various aspects of the Jewish migration situation came to the attention of the World Migration Congress in session here.

Mr. Mertens, vice-president of the Trade Unions International, declared that Belgian workers welcome immigrants to their country, but sometimes they justly resent the immigrants living without contact with the native workers, dwelling in unhygienic conditions and being unwilling to learn the language of the country, thus lowering labor conditions.

Mr. Van Berckelaer, representing the Belgian diamond workers, criticised the unorganized emigration of Jews. He charged the Jewish immigrants in Belgium with being unamenable to trade union discipline.

Mr. Cramp, secretary of the British Railway Workers’ Union, pointed to the existing cultural, religious and racial prejudices against immigrants and declared it was essential that the immigrants drop their previous habits and become assimilated into the native population. Mr. Evitt, representative of the Australian workers, expressed himself in favor of restricting immigration to Australia against those immigrants who declare their intention of engaging in agriculture and afterward settle in the towns. He urged the European countries not to seek to remedy conditions by emigration but by seeking an improvement of local conditions. Australia is determined to keep its restriction of immigration in order to maintain a “purely white Australia,” he declared.

Mr. Ben Zvi, representative of the Palestine Jewish Labor Federation, submitted a memorandum on behalf of the Histadruth urging the cooperation of international labor in exercising pressure through the International Labor Office protesting against the restriction of immigration to Palestine.

The memorandum submitted to the World Migration Congress by the Bund, on the other hand, states that Palestine is merely an illusion. The memorandum of the Bund welcomes the plan of Jewish colonization in Soviet Russia and demands the removal of national and religious hostility toward immigrants of all countries.