REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER-GENERAL OF IMMIGRATION. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE AND LABOR, BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION, Washington, July 1, 1910. SIR: In reviewing the work of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization for the fiscal year 1910, several facts stand out very prominently. The immigration of aliens returned to the million mark (1,041,570); it was necessary and possible to reject at the ports a larger number and percentage of aliens than in any preceding like period (24,270, which is 2 per cent of the number applying), and a larger number than ever before were arrested and deported (2,695). Also a marked improvement in the efficiency of the service and a material reduction in the cost of conducting it were effected. In presenting for your consideration a statement of the work accomplished, together with such recommendations as seem to the Bureau to be appropriate, the general plan followed last year is again adopted, so that comparisons may readily be drawn between this report and that for 1909. Comparisons between these two and former reports can be made also without great difficulty. In the body of the report are presented statistics and statements regarding the enforcement of the immigration and Chinese-exclusion laws. For details concerning the work of the Naturalization and Information divisions, respectively, attention is directed to Appendixes II and III (pp. 345, 377), being reports of the chiefs thereof. Also there is reinserted (as Appendix I), with modifications to make it include all of the Bureau's recommendations of last year and this, the draft of a proposed new immigration act that was prepared with great care and explained in minute detail in the report for 1909. The object in republishing the draft of the proposed new law is to emphasize the importance to a proper control of immigration of adopting a comprehensive, simply worded, and logically arranged measure-one which will reduce to a minimum chances for the defeat of its objects by strict and technical judicial interpretations, and one the language of which will contain to the fullest extent possible its own interpretation. Experience with the past and present statutes has demonstrated the necessity for the enactment of such a law. NEW LEGISLATION NEEDED.a The Bureau had hoped that many of the recommendations urged by it in former years, and particularly emphasized in its last report, would be adopted at the session of Congress just closed, especially as some of them had been reenforced by recommendations of the Immigration Commission; but, while the session witnessed the introduction of a number of bills, a few of which contain provisions like or a For additional suggestions, see pp. 166, 272, 275-278, 282-288, 291, 301, 304, and Appendix 1. similar to those suggested by the Bureau and the Commission, only two were passed. Those two contain important and far-reaching amendments to the provisions which contemplate the rejection and expulsion of aliens of the sexually immoral classes and the control of the "white-slave traffic," and, if upheld at all points by the courts, will be of material benefit. Their main features are (1) the elimination from the law of the three-year limit in so far as these particularly undesirable classes are concerned, a provision so obviously correct in principle as to cause some wonder that the Government should ever have deliberately limited itself to three years with respect to the inherent right of a government to expel from its territory foreigners who are a menace to its welfare (149 U. S., 698); and (2) the investment of the Commissioner-General of Immigration with power to collect data regarding the procuration of women for immoral purposes from the keepers of the houses in which they are placed. All of the reasons which led the Bureau to believe when preparing its report for 1909 that the time was ripe for suggestions to Congress and the public, having in view the adoption of a comprehensive law on all phases of immigration, still hold good. The Immigration Commission will soon submit its final report; the public interest is not waning, but waxing, and there is now, it is believed, a stronger conviction than has ever existed before in the minds of Americans of all classes that the further reasonable restriction and more complete control of immigration must be accomplished as a matter of self-defense, and that its supervision should be along practical lines of already demonstrated value. The Bureau does not hesitate therefore to repeat all it said last year in favor of the adoption of the proposed new law, as well as the suggestions for distinctly new legislation. Its recommendations, so far as it has been able to judge, have quite generally been approved by the public, and there can be no doubt that its accumulated practical experience confers some right upon it to speak as an authority on such subjects. This experience not only shows that the existing immigration and Chinese-exclusion laws are not fully effective (and can not be made so by administrative action), but points clearly to the means by which they can be made more efficacious by additional legislation. Why should all concerned not enjoy the benefit of this practical knowledge in further efforts to arrange an effective plan for the supervision of immigration? The Chinese-exclusion laws are badly in need of revision, as is shown more particularly under the title devoted to a discussion of the subject of Chinese exclusion (p. 280). For a further restriction of general immigration there are offered the following recommendations, which have also been inserted in appropriate language at proper points in the suggested codification of the law, to the different features of which attention is directed as the various subjects are reached in this report: The classification in which fall most of the aliens rejected under the existing law is "Persons likely to become a public charge." Neither that classification nor the new class added to the act of 1907 of persons certified for mental or physical defects affecting ability to earn a living is by any means broad enough to reach all undesirables. It is well to exclude those who are deemed likely to be burdens upon the public and those who are mentally or physically defective. But it is quite as important that there should be excluded those who if admitted will be barely able to support themselves and whose pres |