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IMMIGRANTS AND CRIME

BY HON. WILLIAM S. BennET,

Member of Congress for New York, and Member of the Immigration
Commission.

My theme is Immigrants and Crime. In connection with crime there seems to be a tendency to restrict the term "immigrant" to the South European and Hebrew peoples. Statistics do not restrict the subject in that way, and people who sometimes carelessly read statistics without analyzing them, fly to the conclusion that the statistics relating to immigration and alien criminals relate entirely to the Italian, the Greek, the Syrian, the Slav and the Russian and Roumanian Jew. They do nothing of the sort. They allude to the foreign born, no matter how long he has been here, and if you will take the trouble the next time you look up the statistics of aliens in criminal institutions to analyze those statistics and find out how many years the bulk of them have been here, you will find that the great bulk of the aliens in our criminal institutions, the great bulk of the aliens in the institutions for the insane are of immigration which came here before the South European immigration started.

The Italian, and in the bulk, the Russian Hebrew and the Roumanian Hebrew immigration have arrived chiefly during the last twenty-seven years, and the aliens in our institutions are recruited from the class who have been in this country twenty, thirty or more years, although, of course, there is a regrettable number which go into our institutions in the first year.

We were lax in the early days in relation to immigration when there were nothing but sailing ships, and the rates of transportation were so high as to be almost prohibitive. Laxness then amounted to less than at present because expense barred the great mass of the immigrants, and it is to the few years since steam has made transportation easier and cheaper that we owe a great deal of our criminal and helpless alien population; although as far back as 1819 the Society for the Prevention of Destitution in New York City reported that the class of immigrants coming into the

country in those days was so low, so poverty stricken, and had such a tendency toward crime and illiteracy, that it was imposing a burden upon the community that certainly could not be borne. If I had not seen the date marked on the printed page, I might have thought that that particular report was made by a charitable society in 1908 in the same city. The problem is being stated, in the same words, with the lapse of nearly a hundred years. But what happened in the first few years of cheap steam navigation? This: there were no laws at all, except the inefficient, unenforced state laws. Any person that could get across the Atlantic Ocean and get his foot on American soil was safely here.

Our thrifty friends on the other side of the Atlantic took advantage of that, and thirty years ago societies were actually organized for the purpose of sending to this country criminals, paupers, old people, and the class that we call unfortunate women. They advertised in the newspapers for subscriptions. People left them legacies in their wills and they used that money to bring to this country the unfortunate from the lands across the sea, and they came into this country without let or hindrance.

That was all before the South European immigration had started, and from countries from which the very best of our immigrants, according to the universal acceptation, have come. It went so far that the British Government, about twenty-six or twentyseven years ago, chartered a ship called the "Formosa" and sent it around Ireland, and from the workhouses in Ireland filled that ship and then started it straight for New York. There was instance after instance where the people from that ship were in the workhouse in New York City with British workhouse clothes still on them within twenty-four hours after the ship landed.

That is what we contended with in the past. There was no law against the pauper, the immoral person or the convict; just the wideopen door. We have had inspection of any sort only since 1892 or 1893, and only inspection that amounted to anywhere near the maximum since 1903-six years.

That there are alien criminals in this country it would be idle to deny. I will speak of the South European criminal, because with the criminal of other nationalities we have become acquainted. We have reached the point in connection with those people where we are willing to admit that a man born in Germany, or

England, or any of the Scandinavian countries, good or bad, is a separate individual. We refuse to admit that as yet in connection with the Russian Hebrew or the Roumanian Hebrew, the Greek or the Italian. We insist on treating them as a mass, and attributing the crimes of the individual to the people as a whole.

You can make all sorts of statistics about the Italian criminal based on what you put in or leave out in the matter of the major or the minor crime. A distinguished gentleman once drew up a table by which he proved that the Italians were at the head of the list in crime, and another equally distinguished and able gentleman analyzed the list and found that in making up the list all crimes resulting from intoxication, or the over-use of stimulants, had been left out. Of course, as the Italian is temperate, that treated him unfairly.

I have some statistics here about our own city and state. I presume that the proportion of foreign born in our state is something like twenty-six or twenty-eight per cent. of the whole. In the year 1907 there were 5513 convictions for felonies, that is, a major crime, in our state. Of those, 1757, or 31.87 per cent., were committed by the foreign born, only a per cent. or two above their proportion of the population. If, with the history of the centuries of our education and opportunities behind us, we have not gained something over the Italian, and particularly over the South Italian, then so far as our attempt to improve civilization is concerned, we have been a failure. If the percentage of crime amongst those of native-born parentage is as great as the percentage of crime amongst the foreign born, of what use to us have been our boasted and valued institutions?

My friends, talk about the Italian who comes here as the scum of Italy! I want emphatically to deny it. I am country-born myself, although to some extent city reared, and I never will accept or admit the doctrine that country people as a whole are inferior to city people. The Italian who comes here is the country man, the "contadino" from the hills.

Those who come from Naples and Palermo, and who did come from Messina are an extremely inconsiderable percentage. But if you get back in Sicily and Calabria,-and in New York if you mention Sicily and Calabria the people shudder and say, "those pestholes; those breeders of vice and crime,”-they are mountain countries, particularly Calabria, where the people live a simple life in

villages. You cannot go into a village in any part of Calabria and stand on the street corner five minutes without having some one come to you who has a friend or relative in the United States, and you cannot stand there five minutes longer before some one comes along and talks English to you; some one who has been in this country.

They talk about the brigands of Sicily. There is just one left, and his name is "Maloney," but he does not spell it that way. Maloni-that is Maloney in Italian. Over in Calabria they have written a book on the last of the brigands, Musalino, and he is either dead or in jail. Brigandage in those countries was an economic fact. When wages were sixteen cents a day, and it was hard to get a job, a certain portion of the more daring and restless amongst the young men went into brigandage as an occupation. Now wages have risen to an average of forty cents, and work is fairly constant, and at certain portions of the year there is more of demand than there is of supply of labor, and, consequently, with a chance to earn their living honestly the youth of Italy are not going into brigandage.

The worst Italian comes from the cities. I have a little pamphlet here which I got to-day, "The Truth About the Black Hand," and most of it is true except where it says that there is no such thing as the Black Hand. There is a "Black Hand"; possibly not an organization like the "Molly Maguire," with a grip and a password, but an organization with a very thorough understanding. This says there is none. But ask the ordinary, well-to-do Italian about that, and see what he says. I found over in those little villages a condition which is new even to the Italian Government; men who had returned to the village of their youth because they had been threatened by the Black Hand in the United States.

There was an old baron in Galina, down in Calabria, who shook his finger at me across the room in a council chamber in the village and asked why we did not enforce the law in the United States so that decent, self-respecting Italians that came here could stay here, and I did not have any answer for him for the moment. A man of that class gets one letter from the Black Hand and pays no attention. He gets a second letter, sells what he has and goes down to the steamship office and buys a ticket. That shows whether he believes in the Black Hand or not.

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