I. DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ECONOMY.

1.

THE HUMAN SIDE OF IMMIGRATION.

BY JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS, PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION.

The study of race migrations has gone far enough to bring out the dominant fact that economic causes are at the heart of these movements. Adventure has played its part, and war (with plunder for its aim) a still greater part, but plunder was the economics of the barbarian, while the lode-star guiding the world's most romantic adventure was the glitter of precious metals. It is even a little chilling to learn how the most gallant of these explorers did not for a moment forget that they were out for "the dust of the gods."

If, for simplicity, we exclude the war element in migrations, we have the main fact that some millions of people yearly change their habitations on the planet wholly for economic reasons. They believe that they can raise the standards of living through migration, and, so far as our own immigration problem is concerned, this is too clear to require proof. If we look at the results of this migration into the United States,— look at it strictly from the human or world point of view,-who would question for an instant that it stands for results that enlarge opportunity and progress? The world has been the gainer. I find many willing to admit this, who still object to our present immigration,—who object to it as immigration— and quite apart from specific abuses that we may learn to control. They are restrictionists for the sake of restriction, as men are tariff men, not for revenue, but for the sake of keeping out competing products as a working policy. They say we must consider our own national welfare, and not that of the world.

In so far as our own national well-being does conflict with that of the world at large, the point may be granted. But

all who maintain that the good of the United States does conflict (in respect of migration) with the good of Italy, Sweden, or any other country, ought to furnish far more definite proofs than have thus far been forthcoming. I notice that many opponents of immigration deliberately create the material for their objection. They imagine the devastation caused by the inrush of multitudinous Chinese, for example, but with no whit of knowledge as to whether such hordes would really come. A Chinese scholar long in this country tells me there are absolutely no grounds for these terrors. It is almost too easy to show that these imagined evils of immigration have up to date been mistaken. But, before showing this, look one moment still at the problem from the possible good of the world (or at least of the nations) rather than from the supposed exclusive good of the United States.

Next year a possible 225,000 of these immigrants or children of immigrants may return to their native countries,— most of them on visits, some to stay. A large part of these have been successful. They take back with them, on the whole, what the communities from which they came most need,-the kind of courage, increased efficiency, the enlarged political and social outlook which are making themselves more and more felt. Our immigration not only lightens the struggle for existence steadily and permanently in those countries, but it tends as steadily to raise the standard of living there. As ocean transportation cheapens and develops, these reactions grow in such ratio that they are becoming the most powerful of world influences for good on this larger human side. There are in Europe few more stimulating experiences than to see, as in scores of places in Italy, communities transformed and keyed to a higher standard wholly by the influence of returning emigrants. At thousands of points throughout Europe this influence steadily deepens. In Eastern Europe there are multitudes of debt-burdened peasants set free every year by our immigrants. Mortgages are paid off, old debts cancelled, houses and lands restored. We will here waste no time on that shabby superstition that immigrants who send their money out of the country are no good. Strictly from our own point of view, we get the full equivalent of every dollar they earn.

That world-fact is surely to be kept in mind.

If it can be shown that this far-off good is won at the expense of our civilization, that our standards are lowered through and because of benefits to others, we must yield to the first law of self-preservation,-hold fast to our own advantages, though outsiders be excluded.

Before defining my doubts upon this policy of exclusion, it should be said with precision that we are all in agreement on one point; namely, that the unfit should not come. I deal a little later with this term "unfit." Meantime, if it is to be maintained that, barring the unfit, immigration has been and is still immeasurably a greater good than are the evils attaching to it,-good for us as it is good for the world,— to what proofs are we to point? Let me give first not proofs, but extremely suggestive evidence. How much earlier I do not know, but since 1787 we have had an unvarying succession of forebodings as to the coming evils of our immigration. Almost never do they seem really to have come, as feared, but they are always lurking there in the future. I asked several genuine restrictionists among the delegates at the recent Immigration Conference in this city. They agreed that they could point to no observable evil that had arrived, but it certainly would arrive if we did not put up the bars. It was admitted that enormous undertakings were everywhere waiting for more labor and were quite dependent upon it. "But think of a million coming in a single year!" Here is the ghost that for a century and a quarter has worked on our imagination. Now my bits of history are certainly worth recalling. A long list of very able foreign observers, French and English, both report local opinions upon immigration and give their own, T. Hamilton, Miss Martineau, Dickens, Tocqueville, Chevalier, Sir Charles Lyell, Marryat among the number.

When 20,000 were coming in a single year, many wise people were alarmed, and for precisely the same reason that people are now alarmed. How could we assimilate such masses? How could the American standard be maintained in the face of these multitudes? Many of them came without their wives: they would send their money back to Europe. Bred under other political and religious systems, how could harmony be long preserved? And so on through the familiar list.

Before the nineteenth century came in, Washington and the Federalists generally were afraid of immigration. In 1812, at the Hartford Convention, many of the ablest men thought we had inhabitants enough of our own. Jefferson was pretty nearly hysterical in his fears of immigration.

Coming down to 1826, when the foreign observers I have mentioned begin to come, there is a successive chronic alarm reported among the most thoughtful people because of this swelling tide of foreigners. "What can we do with 55,000 people a year!" As we look back upon the tempest of savage prejudice in the middle of the century against the Irish and the Catholics, riots, a convent and two churches burned to the ground, we feel that the "Know-Nothing" fury was appropriately named.

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What prejudice, too, against the Germans who flocked here after the revolution of '48! Would they not subvert the very principles of our government? What a light is thrown on these fears when we look to-day at the German city of Milwaukee and the American city of Philadelphia, not forgetting that such political shame as Milwaukee has had was under an American boss, and not under a German.

In all the earlier years, moreover, there was no effective attempt made to exclude the unfit in any sense. A steady stream of criminals and physically unfit poured into the country, and doubtless brought us much harm, yet the absorbing power of this country had been beyond the wildest calculation. Our immigration, taken as a whole, has been rapidly assimilated, and has probably raised the standard of living rather than lowered it. If exception be made of certain choked conditions in the larger cities, I do not believe that we assimilated our immigrants more easily in those earlier days than we are now doing, for the reason that the number and variety of industries has so enormously increased. Think of the assimilative power of 8,000 industries, as against 300 or 400 industries! Barring again exceptional centres, into which unskilled labor has dropped, our standard of livingwages, hours, and conditions-has been improved by immigration to the present moment,-again, for the plain reason that these new-comers have added so much to that general wealth from which wages are paid.

But, if a million a year are to come, can we continue to use them to the common good? One cannot answer this except by such experience as we have passed through. It should, however, be kept steadily in mind that ocean and railway transportation is so developing that it will more and more act to give automatic relief for congested periods and districts. A half million can now easily leave this country in a single season. This steam traffic will more and more have the same motive to take them away as it has had to bring them, and inducements will be forthcoming. So that many agencies are now at work to strengthen the weakest links in this chain, and this leads us at once into the field where we should find the higher measure of this question,—I mean the whole realm of ideal values that connect themselves with the free and friendly movement that brings foreign races long enough into constant relations to know each other and to tolerate differ

ences.

The supreme world question is that of races learning the highest and most difficult art of civilization, that of living together with good will and intelligence, living together so that they may help each other rather than exploit or despoil each other, because of an outworn surface agriculture and market methods that condemn us to create armies and navies to get rid of surplus products. The United States is helping to solve that problem in the only conceivable way; namely, by giving the races a chance to live together and work together long enough to substitute human and social habits for mere clannish and tribal habits.

What is now the Mother Mischief in our race relationships? Obviously, the shadow of an extremely vulgar ignorance and prejudice, one race against another. Maeterlinck has said it well, the essence of hell is this misunderstanding. That it raises and maintains hell upon earth, we have more illustrations than we know what to do with. Think of two nations as advanced as England and France living century after century hard by each other, and until the most recent years having merely contempt for each other, the average Englishman thinking that a Frenchman was a kind of monkey with clothes on, and that chiefly because he had a different manner and speech from the English.