evil. But the evil of illiteracy is not to be abolished by excluding immigrants who cannot read and write, and the worst evils of promiscuous immigration are not to be corrected by making literacy the test for admission. The illiterates are not, per se, the worst class of undesirables. The most serious evil lies in the entrance to this country of wastrels, of degenerates, of the physically and mentally infirm; above all, of the morally corrupt. No rational man should object to the strictest possible exclusion of these. But there should be no hesitation in preferring an immigrant who is technically illiterate, yet actually intelligent, honest, and industrious, to one who is stupid, dishonest, and lazy, though gifted with all the technical scholarship of the academic curriculum. It should be borne in mind, too, that illiteracy is not merely an imported thing. It bears the stamp "Made in America," too. Indeed, there is vastly more native than naturalized illiteracy, if we take our whole population into the reckoning; and there is nearly as much native as naturalized if we have regard to only the white race. According to the census of 1910 the numbers of illiterates above the age of ten years were as follows: Negroes, American born.. 2,227,731 1,534,272 1,650,361 Thus there were almost as many white native Americans illiterate as there were illiterate immigrants. True, the proportion of the former to the whole was far less than of the latter. Yet in at least one state the percentage of illiterate native white people was considerably greater than the percentage of illiterate immigrants in the whole country. In Louisiana no fewer than 15 per cent of the native whites above the age of ten were illiterate, while in the whole United States only 12.7 per cent of immigrants suffered that disability. Of course, it might be argued that if we have so many illiterates of our own, there is the more cause for excluding those of other lands who seek to come thither. But there would be to this the ready and effective reply that we are sorely disqualified for casting contumelious and condemnatory stones at the unfortunate of other countries. There is the more force in this latter contention because of the fact that native illiteracy is commonly self-propagating, while alien illiteracy is not. Our native illiterates too often bring up their children as illiterates, while illiterate immigrants do not. That is indeed one of the most impressive circumstances of the whole case. The average native illiterate is the child of an illiterate. But the illiterate immigrant almost invariably takes pains to have his children educated. The result is that the children of immigrants are the most generally literate class of our entire population. Here are the percentages of illiteracy among adults in 1910: Negroes, American born. Whites, foreign born.... Whites, American born of American parents. 30.4 12.7 3.7 1.I Thus the illiterate children of immigrants were less than one-third as many, proportionately, as the illiterate children of native Americans. What is the natural and inevitable deduction? Why, that illiterate immigration, while a present evil, assures a much greater future good. It increases for the present the sum total of illiteracy in the nation, but promises in the next generation to decrease its proportion. It means a present generation of illiterates, but a coming generation of literates. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND IMMIGRATION Immigrants in America Review. 1:9-10. March, 1915 A Domestic Policy. Frances Kellor For the first time in many years this country is free from the absorbing demand made by the entrance of hundreds of thousands of immigrants yearly. Now is the time to take up the conditions of the nearly thirteen million foreign born in this country and to formulate and execute the measures necessary for the welfare of the country. Now is the time to establish adequate machinery for dealing intelligently and efficiently with increased immigration after the war. In the meantime, the unguided child-workers, the children out of school, the illiterate parents, the thousands of unnaturalized, the unemployed, the congested cities and deserted farms, the isolated colonies, the padroni, the precarious institutions for savings and investments, these and many other matters require national consideration and action. New Republic. 1:10-1. December 26, 1914 Wanted-An Immigration Policy The theory of an automatic drying up of the sources of immigration has been emphasized more strongly than ever since the outbreak of the war. Already the westward tide ebbs, and in October only 30,000 immigrant aliens arrived as compared with 134,000 in October of last year. If the war lasts a year or more, millions will be killed by wounds, famine and disease, and other millions will be permanently incapacitated. But even though population does decline, it does not follow that the emigrating impulse will be lessened. The rapid decrease in the Irish population during the half century after the famine did not retard but actually accelerated the emigration. It is not from countries with lessened populations but from countries with lessened economic opportunities that emigration proceeds. And it is exactly this lessening of economic opportunities that we have to fear as a result of the war. The delicate, intricate industrial system by which we all live will be deranged. Capital will be dissipated, credit shattered, and whole trades, the learning of which has cost years of arduous labor, will be for the time discontinued. The system will accommodate itself only slowly to the sudden withdrawal, and later the sudden replacement of millions of wage-earners. If then, as is to be feared, new armies of ragged and unemployed men are to be enrolled as soon as the armies in uniform are disbanded, if wages fall and life becomes insecure, the outward pressure upon the huge wage-earning populations of Europe will be overwhelming, and those who have the means will seek to emigrate. There will be restless millions of former wageearners in whom the fierce emotions of war have made an end to all those industrial ambitions and acquiescences so habitually ignored or disesteemed, and yet vitally essential to the mere existence of society. Others, having lost their farms or their little shops and houses, or their wives and families, and still others who have had their country and their patriotism swept away from under their feet, in fact all who have had the thin thread of custom snapped, will be discontented and mobile. The world will be full of foot-loose adventurers, good and bad, filled with romantic illusions or else utterly disenchanted, and to these broken lives America will appeal with a freshness of attraction such as she has not possessed since the days of '48, when the defeated revolutionists of Germany turned westward to a land which to them embodied the liberal principles for which they had struggled, the land of freedom, the refuge of the oppressed and the defeated of all the world. And recalling, as we must, this high reverence for the America of that day, and this ideal picture of her which may still be found in the hearts of boys risking their lives in the cold trenches-recalling this, does it seem sinister to close the doors upon this misery, to make the wretchedness of the European our excuse for debarring him? It may be sinister. Yet what else has been or can be the justification of that policy of selfdefense which we seek to express in some adequate restriction or regulation of a swelling immigration? Wretchedness is infectious, and no contagion is more deadly than that of poverty. It is the poverty and the resourcelessness of the immigrant, which, handing him over to the exploiter, renders him so dangerous to him |